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BY ERNEST HOWARD CROSBY 







Qass. 



Book. 



PRESENTED BY 



Tolstoy and his Message 



TOLSTOY 
AND HIS 
MESSAGE 



By ERNEST 
HOWARD 
CROSBY 

M 

Author of " Plain 
Talk in Psalm and 
Parable," "The 
Earth for All," "Cap- 
tain Jinks, Hero," 
etc 



FUNK AND WAGNALL'S COMPANY 

30 LAFAYETTE PLACE 

NEW YORK. 

1904 






He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how 
can he love God whom he hath not seen ? 

— /ohn the Apostle. 

To love God means to desire that which He desires, and 
He desires universal welfare. — Tolstoy. 

The desire for good is not God, but only one of His mani- 
festations ; one of the sides from which we see God. God 
manifests Himself in me by the desire for good. — Tolstoy. 



AulLoc 
(Parson) 



Q 

ST 

to 






Contents 



CHAP. PAGE 

I Tolstoy's Boyhood and Manhood • • 7 

II His Great Spiritual Crisis . • 19 

III His Answer to the Riddle of Life . ♦ 34 

IV The Basis of his Moral and Social Code . 46 
V His Teaching tested by the Christian 

Spirit 67 

VI The Christian Teaching in Practice . 74 
VII The Tolstoy of To-day . . . .88 



CHAPTER I 

BOYHOOD AND MANHOOD 

They tell a story of Leo Tolstoy which may or 
may not be true, but which at any rate is 
characteristic of the man, and brings into 
relief the peculiar dramatic quality of his 
mind. He was a student at the University 
of Kazan, and had only spent a few months 
at that great Russian seat of learning, when 
he was invited to attend a ball at the house 
of a nobleman, who lived upon his estate 
near the city. It was a bitter cold winter 
night, and the snow lay heavy upon the ground 
and young Tolstoy went out from town in a 
sleigh driven by a peasant-coachman, for 
there was then no separate liveried class in 
Russia, and the farm-hand in summer might 
become a driver in winter. Tolstoy passed 
the night in feasting and dancing, enjoying 
himself as a youth of eighteen would be likely 
to under the circumstances, and when he 
came out at an early hour of the morning 



8 Bosboob anfc 

wrapped in his furs, he was horrified to find 
his coachman half-frozen to death. It was 
with the greatest difficulty, and only after 
hours of chafing and rubbing, that the man 
was brought back to consciousness and his 
life finally saved. 

This scene remained graven upon the heart 
of the young student, and he could not dis- 
miss it from his thoughts. Why, thought he, 
should I, a young nobleman of eighteen, who 
have never been of any use to any one and 
perhaps never shall be — why should I be 
permitted to pass the night in this great house, 
elegantly furnished and comfortably warmed, 
and to consume in wine and delicacies the 
value of many days' labour, while this poor 
peasant, the representative of the class that 
builds and heats the houses and provides 
the food and drink, is shut out in the cold ? 
He saw, with the true instinct of a seer, that 
it was no accidental event, but the picture 
in miniature of the civilization of the day, 
in which one class sowed and reaped, and 
another enjoyed the harvest. Tolstoy took 
this lesson so to heart that he abandoned his 
university career as a selfish luxury, and went 
down to his country estate, which the early 
death of his parents had already placed in 
his hands, with the determination of devoting 
his life to the serfs whose interests he found 
entrusted to him. It was thus a dramatic 



/n>anboo& y 

incident which formed the first turning-point 
in Tolstoy's life, and we shall see that again 
and again he has been influenced by such 
sights when book or argument could never 
have moved him. 

The estate to which Tolstoy retired was the 
one on which he was born on September 9, 
1828, and on which he still lives. Yasnaia 
Poliana (for such is its name, meaning Clear- 
field) is situated at a distance of ten miles 
from the large manufacturing town of Toula 
and about 120 miles south of Moscow, and 
it is here that he has passed most of his life. 

He gives us some account of his boyhood 
in My Confession, and we may easily fill out 
the picture from the story of little Nicholas, in 
his romance Boyhood, Adolescence, Youth. We 
here have a speaking representation of life on 
a Russian country estate of that period, with 
its patriarchal habits, its strange mixture of 
aristocratic manners and democratic familiarity, 
its easy-going shiftlessness and its quaint 
superstitions. The boy himself is brought up 
in the Orthodox Russian Church amongst his 
brothers and sisters under the charge of a 
German tutor, but we infer that he learns 
most from the simple peasantry, and from 
field and forest. He is a bright, quick, sensi- 
tive, affectionate lad, but far from good-looking, 
for he makes the sad discovery in the looking- 
glass that there is nothing aristocratic in his 



io Bogboofc anfc 

face, that on the contrary he is for all the 
world like a peasant, or " moujik." 

While he is still a boy, the family remove 
to Moscow. When Leo was eleven years old, 
a pupil in a gymnasium spent a Sunday with 
them, and informed the children of the latest 
discovery at school, namely that there was no 
God, and that all that was taught on the 
subject was an invention. " I remember 
well," he says, " how interested my older 
brothers were in this news ; I was admitted 
to their deliberations, and we all eagerly 
accepted the theory as something particularly 
attractive and possibly quite true." 

Thus we have Tolstoy, while hardly out of 
the nursery, a full-fledged nihilist, as he calls 
himself — not indeed a dynamiter, but, as the 
name implies, a believer in nothing — and the 
story of his life is the story of a sincere, spiritu- 
ally-minded man in search of a satisfying faith. 
From the first he honestly wished to become 
a good man, but he received no encouragement 
from others. His longings for a virtuous life 
were met with laughter, but whenever he gave 
way to his lower passions he found only praise 
and approval. " My kind-hearted aunt/' he 
tells us, "a really good woman, used to say 
to me that there was one thing above all others 
which she wished for me — a liaison with a 
married woman — 'nothing so forms a young 



/I&anbooo n 

If Tolstoy left the university because of a 
dramatic picture of the labour question as a 
whole, he found himself at Yasnaia Poliana 
confronted with the same problem in its simplest 
and most comprehensive form, namely the land 
question. Why, indeed, should he, a lad of 
eighteen, own thousands of acres of the surface 
of the earth which God has given to the children 
of men, while his serfs, who cultivated it and 
made it fruitful, did not possess a foot ? There 
is no reasonable answer to this question, and 
while Tolstoy may not have put it to himself 
in that form at that time, still he soon learned 
the futility of benevolence based upon land- 
lordism. 

In his story, A Russian Proprietor, he gives 
the results of his experiences as a country 
gentleman, and shows how his efforts were 
misunderstood by the peasants, and how im- 
possible it was to get into touch with them. 
Over fifty years later, continuing the history 
of the same Prince Nekhludof, in his great 
novel, Resurrection, he gives the true solution 
of the land question by making his hero adopt 
the simple device of the single- tax as advocated 
by Henry George. 

After a few years spent in this unsuccessful 
experiment, Tolstoy gave it up, and secured 
a commission in the army. He served in the 
artillery in the Crimea, and when the Crimean 
War broke out he asked to be transferred to 



12 jBosboob an& 

Sebastopol, and took an active part in the 
defence of that city. Here he was surrounded 
by those dramatic scenes upon which his soul 
was wont to feed. It was war itself that 
taught Tolstoy to abhor war, and his early 
books, written at this period and giving vivid 
accounts of warfare, while they do not explicitly 
condemn war, are sufficiently realistic to dis- 
credit it at least. And in one passage of his 
Sebastopol he seems to anticipate his final 
judgment on military life. He is describing 
a truce for the purpose of burying the dead 
after a sortie. " Thousands of people crowd 
together, look at, speak to, and smile at one 
another. And these people — Christians con- 
fessing the one great law of love and self- 
sacrifice — looking at what they have done, do 
not at once fall repentant on their knees before 
Him who has given them life and laid in the 
soul of each a fear of death and a love of good 
and of beauty, and do not embrace like brothers 
with tears of joy and happiness/ ' 

At the end of the war Tolstoy found a literary 
career open before him, and he resigned his 
commission and went to St. Petersburg to live, 
where he was welcomed by the highest literary 
circle. For some years now he led a more or 
less dissipated life, drank, gambled, and fought 
duels, like his companions. But he was never 
satisfied. His soul always yearned for some- 
thing better. He made the tour of Europe, 



and it shows the serious character of his mind 
that his main object was to visit the great 
thinkers of England and the Continent, and 
question them as to the meaning of life. He 
learned nothing from them, however. Beyond 
a general belief resembling his own in the 
" progress " of the race, and the perfectibility 
of the world, they had nothing to offer him. 
The only thing that he learned on this journey 
was taught him, not by men of science, but 
by another dramatic incident of the kind 
which always so strongly appealed to him. 

" During my stay in Paris," he says, " the 
sight of a public execution revealed to me the 
weakness of my superstitious belief in progress. 
When I saw the head divided from the body 
and heard the sound with which they fell 
separately into the box, I understood, not with 
my reason, but with my whole being, that no 
theory of the wisdom of all established things 
nor of progress, could justify such an act : 
and that if all the men in the world from the 
day of creation, by whatever theory, had found 
this thing necessary, it was not so ; it was a 
bad thing, and that therefore I must judge 
of what was right and necessary, not by what 
men said and did, not by progress, but by 
what I felt to be true in my heart." 

This incident is an excellent example of 
Tolstoy's habit of looking at things afresh as 
if no one had ever considered them before. 



14 JBopboofc anb 

It is clear that he lacks the historical sense 
and that the idea of evolution has made no 
deep impression upon him. He does not 
appreciate the fact that there may have been 
a time when the taking of life was as natural 
and right for man as it is for a tiger to-day, 
and that the theory that we are now growing 
out of the brute state into a higher one explains 
many things otherwise inexplicable. While I 
believe that the standard which he applies in 
this matter of violence is the true standard, 
I should say that the people whom he criticizes 
are not necessarily perverse or wicked, but that 
they have not advanced as far as he has along 
the road of human progress. 

While Tolstoy was abroad on a second journey 
the news came of the liberation of the serfs, 
and he hurried back to Yasnaia Poliana with 
the object of fitting his freed men for their 
new-found freedom. He became head-master 
of the village school, besides publishing an 
educational journal which gave the results of 
his experiences. Many of his articles were 
translated into French thirty years later, and 
published in book form, and they give an 
interesting view of his experiments in pedagogy. 
He started out with the rule that a child should 
not be taught anything that he did not wish 
to learn, and, as is his habit, he adhered to 
his principle through thick and thin. About 
twice a week, after school had been in progress 



/IDanbooJ) 15 

for a couple of hours, some small boy would 
jump up and make for the door. Expostula- 
tions were useless, and in five minutes the 
room would be empty, and remain so for the 
rest of the day. This, however, did not dis- 
concert Tolstoy in the least. It happened, he 
said, only twice a week on an average, and 
after two hours of recitation, and to counter- 
balance these half-holidays he had the satis- 
faction of knowing that on all the other days 
of the week, and for two hours on these days, 
every boy and girl was in the schoolroom 
because he or she preferred to be there. They 
were absolutely free, and he believed that an 
atmosphere of freedom was more favourable 
to education than one of coercion. He never 
took up a lesson to which the children objected, 
nor continued it when their interest began to 
flag, nor interrupted it so long as they were 
eager for it, and he assures us that this last 
rule sometimes kept him in school inconveni- 
ently late in the evening, which fact would 
lead one to suppose that Russian children 
differ from those of other nations. It is to be 
hoped that Tolstoy will still write a book on 
education on the model of his What is Art ? 
It could not fail to be one of the most interest- 
ing and suggestive of his works. 

It was at this period that he accepted the 
post of county magistrate, and his various 
occupations wore upon him so that he fell ill, 



i6 SSosboot) anJ> 

and was obliged to drop everything and go 
out on the steppes to live for a time among 
the Kirghiz and drink Kumyss (a preparation 
of mare's milk) there. But his mind was not 
at rest, and he thinks that the change which 
occurred in his views fifteen years later might 
now have been anticipated if he had not been 
diverted from himself by his marriage. The 
romance of this event is given in Anna 
Karenine, in the courtship of Levine and 
Kitty, and we may state parenthetically that 
Tolstoy walks through all his books, for he 
is more or less identified with Pierre in War 
and Peace, with Levine and little Nicholas, 
with Nekhludoff, and others. 

Tolstoy's family life was completely happy. 
He lived with his wife in the country and they 
rarely went to town. He had a large family 
of children, his expenses increased, and he 
worked assiduously at his great novels, War 
and Peace and Anna Karenine, and his books 
now brought him in a good income. 

The constant employment kept him for 
many years from dwelling on the unsatisfactory 
foundation of his existence, his lack of faith, 
his want of a working theory of life. But 
the books which he was now writing, and even 
those written at an earlier period, give many 
proofs of the fact that the light was already 
dawning in his soul. In fact he informs us 
that almost from the first years of his child- 



/iDanboofc 17 

hood, when he began to read the Gospel for 
himself, the doctrine which teaches love, 
humility, meekness, self-denial, and returning 
good for evil, was the doctrine which touched 
him most. 

It would be interesting to go through his 
earlier works and pick out the passages which 
reflect this feeling. But two examples will 
suffice. In The Cossacks, written in the fifties, 
the hero, Olenine, goes out pheasant shooting 
alone. He lies down in a thicket where a 
deer had lain before him and had left the 
imprint of its body on the leaves, and he is 
suddenly seized by an inexpressible sensation 
of happiness and love for all creation. The 
very gnats that annoyed him at first became 
a necessary part of the forest, and he actually 
ends by finding a certain charm in their 
persistence. He makes the sign of the Cross 
and murmurs a prayer. He feels his identity 
with the wild nature around him ; he is no 
longer a Russian nobleman, but simply a living 
creature. " Why have I never been happy ? " 
he asks. He runs over his life in his mind 
and its selfishness fills him with disgust. 
Suddenly the light bursts upon him. " Happi- 
ness/' he cries, " happiness consists in living 
for others, that is clear. Man aspires to happi- 
ness ; therefore it is a proper desire. If he 
tries to get it in a selfish way, in seeking 
wealth, glory, love, he may not succeed, and 

B 



1 8 3Bosboo& ant) /Bbanboofc 

his wishes remain unsatisfied. Then it must 
be selfish desires which are wrong, and not 
the wish to be happy. What are the dreams 
which may be realized irrespective of our 
outward circumstances ? Only love and self- 
sacrifice. " He jumps up, rejoicing in his 
discovery, and seeks impatiently for some one 
to love, to do good to, to sacrifice himself for. 
And when he returns to the village he insists 
upon presenting his horse to a young Cossack 
who had been his rival in the affections of one 
of the village maidens. He loved every one 
so much that he felt that this remote hamlet 
was his true home, that there was his family 
and his happiness, that nowhere else and never 
again could he be so full of joy. 

The other instance in which Tolstoy antici- 
pates his mature views is found in " War and 
Peace, which was written some years after his 
marriage. It is Pierre who speaks. " To live 
and avoid evil so as to escape remorse, that 
is too little. I have lived that way and my 
life was lost in uselessness. It is only now 
that I really live — that I try to live for others 
that I understand the blessing of it." 



Ibis ©reat Spiritual Crisis 19 



CHAPTER II 

HIS GREAT SPIRITUAL CRISIS 

These clear premonitions of Tolstoy's ultimate 
convictions show how his mind and heart were 
continually working beneath all the apparent 
absorption of his literary and domestic life. 
At fifty years of age he found himself cele- 
brated, rich, surrounded by a loved and loving 
family, and yet so wretched that he thought 
seriously of suicide, and gave up shooting for 
fear that he might be tempted to blow out 
his brains, and hid a rope which offered itself 
too readily to him as a means of escape. The 
question which he had throughout his life 
buried under his superficial activities now rose 
to confront him and to insist upon an answer. 
The crisis, which we find in the lives of 
men who pass through deep spiritual experi- 
ences, and are by them fitted to guide others, 
was upon him. He too was led into the wilder- 
ness. The fact was that the life which had 
been his, however honourable in the eyes of 
the world, was not the true life ; his relations, 
the relations of a rich man, to the poor peasantry 
round him were not such as were demanded 



20 fMs Great 

by his deepest soul, and it was finally in re- 
adjusting those relations that he found peace. 

The question which thus puts itself to him, 
he gives us in various forms : " What if I 
should become more famous than Pushkin 
and Shakespeare — than all the writers of the 
world," he asked himself, " What then ? What 
result will there be from what I am doing now, 
and may do to-morrow ? What will be the 
issue of my life ? Why should I live ? Why 
should I wish for anything ? Why should I 
do anything ? Is there any object in life 
which can survive the inevitable death which 
awaits us ? " For an answer to these questions 
he sought long and patiently in every branch 
of human learning, but in vain. The natural 
sciences ignored them, philosophy admitted 
them but gave no satisfactory solution. He 
turned from the learned books to the men of 
his own circle of society, and made a study of 
their way of accounting for life. He discovered 
that they met the question in four equally 
senseless ways : namely, by remaining ignorant 
of it, by recognizing it but seeking distraction 
in ephemeral amusements and occupations, by 
suicide, and by a cowardly avoidance of suicide, 
continuing to drag on a hopeless existence. 

During all this time Tolstoy laboured under 
the belief that his own small circle of learned, 
rich, and idle people formed the whole of 
humanity, and that the millions outside did 



Spiritual Crisis 21 

not deserve serious consideration, but fortu- 
nately his strange instinctive affection for the 
working classes came at last to his rescue and 
he turned to them. He began to feel that if he 
wished to understand the meaning of life, he 
must seek it amongst those who had not lost 
their grasp upon it, among the millions on 
whom rests the burden of our life and theirs. 
Accordingly he applied himself to the study of 
the simple, unlearned and poor peasantry of 
his neighbourhood, and at once discovered 
that he could not classify them with his rich 
friends, for they found nothing unreasonable 
in life, neither did they ignore the questions 
which had disturbed him. He became con- 
vinced that while the knowledge of the learned 
based on intellectual activity denied a mean- 
ing to life, the great mass of mankind have 
an unreasoning consciousness of life which gives 
a meaning to it. It was in short their faith 
which brought them into relation with the 
infinite. 

Here was the defect of the learned authors 
and the fashionable world : neither of them 
provided any bridge between the finite self and 
the infinite — neither of them assigned any 
reasonable function to the finite creature in an 
infinite world. The faith of the peasantry 
supplied this missing link, and he saw that 
this faith was not intellectual acquiescence in 
certain truths, but the knowledge of the mean- 



22 1bis Great 

ing of life — the very force itself of life. For 
any one to live he must either close his eyes 
to infinity or find some way of relating himself 
to the infinite. " What am I ? ,J he asked. 
" A part of an infinite whole." Here was the 
answer to the problem ; and faith which defines 
our relation to the whole world is the deepest 
source of human wisdom. 

Filled with this belief, Tolstoy sought instruc- 
tion from his orthodox friends, but he found 
no satisfaction in their doctrines, not so much 
on account of the unreasonable statements that 
were mixed with them as because of the fact 
that they did not live according to the doctrines 
which they professed. He was persuaded that 
they deceived themselves. He looked in vain 
to them for actions showing that their concep- 
tion of life had destroyed their fear of poverty, 
illness and death. 

He turned to the believers among the poor, 
the pilgrims, the monks, the members of the 
various peasant sects. They too professed the 
same superstitions which offended him among 
the higher classes, but there was this differ- 
ence : the whole life of the rich was in flat 
contradiction with their faith, while that of the 
people was in complete consistency with it. 

The more Tolstoy studied the lives of the 
peasantry, the more he was convinced that 
they had a true faith, a solid foundation for 
their lives. They passed their days contentedly 



Spiritual Crisis 23 

in heavy labour ; they accepted illness and 
sorrow unresistingly, in the assurance that all 
was for the best ; they lived, suffered, and 
drew near death in quiet confidence and often 
with joy. Among them death is almost invari- 
able easy, without terror and despair. In all 
these things their life presented the greatest 
contrast to that of the world of wealth and 
culture. 

This distinction between rich and poor, 
which had so long haunted the mind of Tolstoy 
like a phantom, now took the form of a sub- 
stantial conviction, and the manner of life of 
his own class became senseless and repulsive 
to him. He saw clearly that the difficulty in 
finding the meaning of life arose from leading 
a false and artificial life, and from not sharing 
in the common life of humanity. 

Throughout all this period of mental torment, 
his heart had been oppressed by a feeling 
which he says he cannot describe otherwise 
than as a searching after God, a feeling of 
dread, of orphanhood, of isolation. He now 
made every effort to apprehend what God was. 
Sometimes for a moment he would seem to 
have found Him and then only he would feel 
that he really lived, but he would soon lose his 
grasp. 

One day in the early spring, while he was 
walking in the woods, he was as usual engaged 
in such thoughts. " I do not live when I lose 



H t>is (Bteat 

faith in the existence of God," he said to him- 
self ; " I only really live when I seek 
him." "What more then do you seek?" a 
voice seemed to cry within him, " this is He, 
He without whom there is no life. To know 
God and to live are one. God is life. Live to 
seek God and life will not be without Him." 
" And stronger than ever," he tells us, " life 
rose up within me and round me, and the light 
that then shone forth never left me afterwards." 

" I renounced the life of my own class," his 
Confession continues, " f or I had come to confess 
that it was not a real life, only the semblance 
of one, that its superfluous luxury prevented 
the possibility of understanding life, and that 
in order to do so I must know, not an excep- 
tional parasitic life, but the simple life of the 
working classes, of those who produce life and 
give it a meaning." And once more he turned 
to the Russian peasantry, but he soon was 
impressed by the fact that their simple faith 
in the necessity of following God's will by 
labour, humility, patience, and goodwill to all 
men, was bound up with much superstition. 
However, he tried to ignore this, and returned 
to the church of his childhood. 

For three years he was a regular attendant 
at the little village church at Yasnia Poliana, 
striving with all his might to enter into the 
spirit of the peasants and to overlook the con- 
tradictions, obscurities and superstitions of 



Spiritual Crisis 25 

their cult. But finally the obstacle which 
turned him away from the church was not a 
matter of form or theory, but a purely prac- 
tical and ethical matter which shocked his 
essentially practical mind. It was in the year 
1878, and the great Russo-Turkish war had 
broken out. The Holy Synod ordered prayers 
to be said in the churches for the success of the 
Russian armies, and when Tolstoy heard the lips 
of the priest, who had so often read the Gospel 
injunction to love your enemies and do good to 
those who despitefully use you, utter supplica- 
tions in the name of Jesus to the Almighty that 
He might destroy the Turks with sword and 
bombshell, or words to that effect, his soul re- 
volted at the blasphemy and as he left the 
building he shook the dust from his feet. 

Tolstoy's struggle to gain the truth seemed 
for a moment to have failed, but he clutched 
at one remaining straw. The Church was 
founded upon the Gospels. (In Russia they 
say " the Gospels," when we say " the Bible/ ' 
and they give the proper precedence to the four 
biographies of Jesus.) The Church was founded 
upon the Gospels and any truth which the 
Church possesses must be contained in those 
Gospels. He would study them for himself ; 
and he set to work with his usual thoroughness, 
single-mindedness and patience. He took up 
the Greek language again, so that he might not 
be misled by translators, and the result of 



26 t)is Great 

his labour is shown in a complete commentary 
in three volumes with the Greek text in one 
column, the translation in another and his 
notes below. 

Tolstoy is not a scholar and his knowledge 
of Greek is not profound. There are some 
drawbacks also in his methods. For instance,; 
when he does not like a verse he simply leaves 
it out, a wonderfully simple expedient which 
seems to have escaped the ingenuity of former 
commentators, and it is remarkable that they 
never thought of it, it is so satisfactory — to the 
commentator. But making all allowances fcr 
Tolstoy's arbitrary ways and his lack of scholar- 
ship, the fact remains that his dramatic quality 
of mind has enabled him to enter into the spirit 
of the Gospel narrative as few other writers 
have ever done. He describes the events 
as if they had occurred in Moscow to-day, and 
we see with new insight why the Pharisees 
spake thus and why the disciples made such 
and such an answer. 

When Tolstoy began to examine the record 
of the evangelists, he was struck by the fact 
that the texts upon which the Church founded 
its dogmas were invariably obscure, while those 
which teach us how to live are clear and to the 
point. He read the Gospel over and over again 
and he was most impressed by the Sermon on 
the Mount. Nowhere else did he find such 
plain and definite precepts, and for that reason 



Spiritual Crisis 27 

he looked particularly to these three chapters 
of St. Matthew for a solution of his doubts. 
Whenever he read them his heart was touched 
b y the idea of turning the cheek to the smiter 
of giving up our cloak to him who takes our 
coat, of loving our enemies ; and yet these 
texts seemed to call for an impossible self- 
sacrifice which was inconsistent with true life. 

He sought counsel in the commentaries and 
treatises of learned theologians, but they gave 
him no help. It w T as only after he had given 
up all expectation of aid from such sources and 
had ceased to expend deep thought and in- 
tellectual skill in comparing texts, and when at 
last he approached the simple account of Christ's 
words as a little child, that he came to under- 
stand them. " The text that gave me the key 
to the truth," he says, " was the 39th verse of 
the fifth chapter of St. Matthew : * Ye have 
heard that it hath been said, an eye for an eye 
and a tooth for a tooth. But I say unto you 
that ye resist not evil.' The simple meaning 
of these words suddenly flashed full upon me ; 
I accepted the fact that Christ meant exactly 
what He said, and then, though I had found 
nothing new, all that had hitherto obscured 
the truth cleared away, and the truth itself 
arose before me in all its solemn importance." 

" Christ was not exaggerating. He says, 
1 Resist not him that is evil ; ' but if you obey 
Him in this, you may meet some one who, 



28 Ibis ©teat 

having smitten you on one cheek and meeting 
with no resistance, will smite you on the other ; 
who, after taking away your coat, will take away 
your cloak also ; having profited by your work 
wall oblige you to work on ; who will take and 
never give back. ' Nevertheless I say unto 
you, that ye resist not him that is evil/ Still 
do good to those that even smite and abuse you. 
: : s Christ meant to say, ' Whatever men may 
do to you, bear, suffer, submit, but never 
resist evil/ What could be clearer, more in- 
telligible and more indubitable than this ? As 
soon as I understood the exact meaning of these 
simple words, all that had appeared to me con- 
fused in the doctrine of Christ grew intelligible ; 
what had seemed contradictory now became 
consistent, and what I had deemed superfluous 
became indispensable. All united in one whole, 
one part fitting into and supporting the other, 
like the pieces of a broken statue put together 
again into their proper place." 

Let us briefly glance at the remaining years 
of Count Tolstoy's history before returning to 
the consideration of the system of ethics to 
which his admission of the doctrine of non- 
resistance led him. In 1881 he once more made 
Moscow his home, and sought in schemes of 
philanthropy some outlet for his new-found 
spiritual energy. A census of the city was in 
progress and he had himself appointed as census- 
taker in one of the poorest neighbourhoods in 



Spiritual Crisis 29 

order that he might become familiar with the 
population. He happened to meet the peasant 
sectary and religious reformer Soutaieff and 
explained to him his plans for the care of the 
aged and orphans and for putting an end to all 
misery in the city, expecting to receive en- 
couragement from him, but the moujik kept 
silence. Finally Tolstoy asked him what he 
thought of the scheme. " That's all nonsense," 
was the answer. 

" Why ? " 

" Because no good can come from it." 

" How so ? Does not the Gospel teach us to 
clothe the naked and feed the hungry ?- " 

" Yes, but money will not do. They need 
moral help." 

11 But would you let them die of hunger and 
cold ? " 

" Not at all," said Soutaieff. " But how 
many paupers are there ? " 

" Nearly 20.000 at Moscow." 

He smiled. " And are there not a million 
hearths in Russia ? " he asked. " Let us work 
with them, and have them eat at our tables and 
hear good words from us ; that would be true 
almsgiving. All the rest is absurdity." 

The truth of these remarks grew upon Tol- 
stoy. It was a fact ; his much vaunted philan- 
thropy was a mistake. The poor to whom he 
offered money, saw him in his fine clothes and 
well-appointed carriage and knew that he was 



3° UMs ©veat 

only giving away what he had easily taken 
from others. He always experienced an un- 
comfortable sensation in giving money and the 
people to whom he gave also appeared ill at 
ease in their relations to him. 

He learned that, so far from uniting people 
in bonds of affection, there is nothing which 
separates them so surely as money given and 
taken in the w r ay of ordinary charity. He had 
a plan for a charitable society for collecting the 
superfluous wealth of the rich and distributing 
it among the poor, but he began to have doubts 
of the righteousness of such an institution. 
His doubts were confirmed by another little event 
which left a convincing dramatic picture upon 
his memory. 

He had already made up his mind that man, 
having arms and legs as well as a brain, should 
find useful work for them all, and he had se- 
lected for his own manual labour w T hile he was 
in town the sawing of wood in the wood-yards 
of the suburbs. One day as he was walking 
back to the city with two peasants who had been 
sawing wood with him, an old beggar ap- 
proached them asking for alms. Tolstoy and 
one of his companions each gave him a small 
coin, and this little incident set Tolstoy think- 
ing. Those two acts looked alike, he thought, 
but they were altogether different. This man 
earned the coin that he gave. He was giving 
his own labour ; he was giving himself. Then 



Spiritual Crisis 3* 

again, he is very poor. He needs every penny 
he can get. To-night at supper he may have 
to go without some necessary oi life, as we 
should call it, because he has given that piece 
of money away. And now, how is it with me ? 
In the first place, I have so much money that 
I could not possibly miss my coin ; I should 
scarcely know whether I had it or not. And 
then, how did I get it ? It is part of the rent 
of one of my farms in the country. I have 
simply taken it out of the pocket of a peasant 
in the country and put it into the hat of a 
peasant in the city ; that is all I have had to do 
with it. 

And from the lesson of this incident Tolstoy 
concluded that the only true Christian alms- 
giving was to give of your own earnings, your 
own life, and to give something that required 
some degree of self-denial. He now saw that 
there was nothing in his charitable scheme which 
would respond to the needs of his heart. It was 
clear to him, too, that it was only by keeping 
the poor at arm's length that a rich man could 
secure a quiet conscience in ordinary charitable 
work, for the most cruel of men could scarcely 
dine with fine courses in the presence of people 
with empty stomachs or with nothing but 
black bread to eat. 

We separate ourselves from the poor by a 
barrier of customs and conventionalities, of 
masonic signs, as it were, — a knowledge of 



32 1E>ls ©teat 

which is requisite to admittance to our society, 
and Tolstoy determined that this barrier must 
be broken down before the poor could be effect- 
ually helped. He was living the wrong life ; 
he was sunk in the mire up to his neck and yet 
wished to aid others to get out. The upper 
classes by their idleness, their luxury, their use- 
less occupations, forced the working-classes 
lower and lower, and made the gulf between 
them wider and wider. " I am sitting on the 
back of a man whom I am crushing," says 
Tolstoy ; "I insist on his carrying me, and 
without setting him free, I tell him that I pity 
him a great deal, and that I have only one 
desire, that of improving his condition by all 
possible means. And yet, I never get off his 
back. If I wish to help the poor, I must not be 
the cause of the poverty." x 

And Tolstoy was filled with disgust for the 
fashionable life he had so long been living and 
which had concealed the truth from him so com- 
pletely. He was impelled by an irresistible 
impulse to renounce the luxuries of his position, 
and he began to wear the peasant's garb as a 
protest against the falsehoods of caste and 

1 Thoreau's Essay on Civil Disobedience : 
4C If I devote myself to other pursuits and con- 
templations, I must first see, at least, that I do 
not pursue them sitting upon another man's 
shoulders. I must get off him first, that he 
may pursue his contemplations too." 



Spiritual Crisis 33 

monopoly. And he saw that the reason that 
he had been ignorant of his true position was 
that he had looked upon his money as the same 
as the peasant's. Money has long since lost its 
simple function of serving as a medium for the 
exchange of the products of labour. In a 
natural Christian society that would be its only 
use, but as things are, with the presence of 
unequal opportunities and unjust distribution 
of wealth, it represents might and not right. In 
the peasant's hands money represents work ; 
in the landlord's it stands for force, and nothing 
else. Money, in fact, according to Tolstoy, has 
become a means of enslaving the poor. Money 
was a great evil; so too were cities, in his 
estimation, attracting peasants from the country 
to wait upon the caprices of the rich. 

And now Tolstoy turned his back upon 
Moscow, resolved to lead a natural life at 
Yasnaia Poliana, and as far as in him lay to 
get off the back of the poor brethren ; and 
there he continues to live, writing day by day 
moral tales for the peasants, and treatises and 
essays for the world at large, and coming to 
town for a time in the winter only when agri- 
culture is impossible, and thus exerting his per- 
sonal influence upon those who gather at his 
house, a valuable privilege in a country in which 
he cannot publish his deepest thoughts. 



34 t>is Hnswer to tbe 



CHAPTER III 

Tolstoy's Answer to the Riddle of Life 

It is time now that we should form some idea 
of Tolstoy's opinions as a whole, and in order 
to appreciate their organic oneness we must 
try first to obtain his central point of view. 
This is best given, it seems to me, in his little 
treatise On Life. I remember well my first 
acquaintance with this book. I was living in 
Alexandria, in Egypt, at the time, and I 
chanced to pick up a French copy of it (De la 
Vie, translated by Countess Tolstoy) at a book- 
seller's in that city. I knew little of Tolstoy 
then. I had, however, read Anna Karenina 
years before, and been duly impressed by it, 
and afterwards I had read a collection of his 
practical essays on vicious habits, which had 
seemed to me rather narrow and ascetic, but 
which nevertheless had had the effect of making 
me stop smoking for three or four days — no 
mean achievement at that time even for a 
Tolstoy. These recollections induced me to 
buy the volume On Life, and I took it home 
with me and read it through almost at one sit- 
ting on a Sunday. I cannot do better perhaps 



TRi&Me of Xtfe 35 

than to give a resume of his argument in this 
book. 

Most men, he says, lead only an animal life, 
and among these there are always some who 
think themselves called upon to guide humanity. 
They undertake to teach the meaning of life 
without understanding it themselves. These 
teachers are divided into two classes. To the 
first, composed of scientific men, Tolstoy gives 
the name of " Scribes.' ' These it is who de- 
clare that man's life is nothing but his existence 
between birth and death, and that it proceeds 
from mechanical forces — that is, from forces 
which we style mechanical for the express pur- 
pose of distinguishing them from life. It is only 
in the infancy of a science, when it is as yet vague 
and indefinite, that it can thus pretend to 
account for all phenomena of life. Astronomy 
made the attempt when it was known as as- 
trology ; chemistry assumed the same role 
under the name of alchemy ; and to-day the 
science of biology is passing through a similar 
phase. While occupied with one or more 
aspects of life, it claims to embrace the whole. 
The other class of false doctors he calls the 
" Pharisees." They are those who profess 
verbally the tenets of the founders of the re- 
ligions in which they have been educated, but 
who do not comprehend their real meaning 
and consequently content themselves with 
insisting on forms and ceremonies. 



36 Dfs Bnswer to tbe 

The wars of the Scribes and Pharisees — that 
is, of false science and false religion — have so 
obscured the definitions of life laid down ages 
ago by the great thinkers of mankind, that the 
Scribes are quite ignorant that the dogmas of 
the Pharisees have any reasonable foundation 
at all ; and, strange to say, the fact that the 
doctrines of the great masters of old have so 
impressed men by their sublimity that they 
have usually attributed to them a supernatural 
origin, is enough to make the Scribes reject them. 
Because the speculations of Aristotle, Bacon 
and Comte have appealed to only a small 
number of students — because they have never 
been able to gain a hold on the masses and have 
thus avoided the exaggerations produced by 
superstition — this clear mark of their insignifi- 
cance is admitted as evidence of their truth. 
As for the teachings of the Brahmins, of Buddha, 
of Zoroaster, of Lao-Tse, of Confucius, ot 
Isaiah, and also of Christ, they are taxed with 
superstition and error simply because they 
have completely transformed the lives of millions 
of men. 

Turning from the futile strife of Scribes and 
Pharisees, we should begin our researches with 
that which we alone know with certitude, and 
that is the "I M within us. Life is what I feel 
in myself, and this life science cannot define. 
Nay, it is my idea of life rather which deter- 
mines what I am to consider as science, and I 



IRi&ble of Xife 37 

learn all outside of myself solely by the extension 
of my knowledge of my own mind and body. 
We know from within that man lives only for his 
own happiness, and his aspiration towards it 
and his pursuit of it constitute his life. At 
first he is conscious of the life in himself alone, 
and hence he imagines that the good which he 
seeks must be his own individual good. His 
own life seems the real life, while he regards the 
life of others as a mere phantom. He soon 
finds out that other men take the same view 
of the world, and that the life in which he shares 
is composed of a vast number of individualities, 
each bent on securing its own welfare, and 
consequently doing all it can to thwart and 
destroy the others. He sees that in such a 
struggle it is almost hopeless for him to contend, 
for all mankind is against him. If, on the other 
hand, he succeeds by chance in carrying out his 
plans for happiness, he does not even then enjoy 
the prize as he anticipated. The older he grows, 
the rarer become the pleasures ; ennui, satiety, 
trouble and suffering go on increasing ; and 
before him lie old age, infirmity and death. He 
will go down to the grave, but the world will 
continue to live. 

The real life, then, is the life outside him, 
and his own life, which originally appeared to 
him the one thing of importance, is after all a 
deception. The good of the individual is an 
imposture, and if it could be obtained it would 



38 Ibis answer to tbe 

cease at death. The life of man as an in- 
dividuality seeking his own good, in the midst 
of an infinite host of similar individualities en- 
gaged in bringing one another to naught and 
being themselves annihilated in the end, is an 
evil and an absurdity. It cannot be the true 
life. 

Our quandary arises from looking upon our 
animal life as the real life. Our real life begins 
with the waking of our consciousness, at the 
moment when we perceive that life lived for 
self cannot produce happiness. We feel that 
there must be some other good. We make an 
effort to find it, but, failing, we fall back into 
our old ways. These are the first throes of the 
birth of the veritable human life. This new 
life only becomes manifest when the man once 
for all renounces the welfare of his animal indi- 
viduality as his aim in life. By so doing he 
fulfils the law of reason, the law which we all 
are sensible of within us — the same universal 
law which governs the nutrition and repro- 
duction of beast and plant. 

Our real life is our willing submission to this 
law, and not, as science would have us hold, the 
involuntary subjection of our bodies to the laws 
of organic existence. Self-renunciation is as 
natural to man as it is for birds to use their 
wings instead of their feet; it is not a meri- 
torious or heroic act ; it is simply the necessary 
condition precedent of genuine human life. 



KHMrte of Xife 39 

This new human life exhibits itself in our 
animal existence just as animal life does in 
matter. Matter is the instrument of animal life, 
not an obstacle to it ; and so our animal life is 
the instrument of our higher human life and 
should conform to its behests. 

Life, then, is the activity of the animal in- 
dividuality working in submission to the law of 
reason. Reason shows man that happiness can- 
not be obtained by a selfish life, and leaves only 
one outlet open for him, and that is Love. Love 
is the only legitimate manifestation of life. It 
is an activity which has for its object the good 
of others. When it makes its appearance, the 
meaningless strife of the animal life ceases. 

Real love is not the preference of certain 
persons whose presence gives one pleasure. 
This, which is ordinarily called love, is only a 
wild stock on which true love may be grafted, 
and true love does not become possible until 
man has given up the pursuit of his own welfare. 
Then at last all the juices of his life come to 
nourish the noble graft, while the trunk of the 
old tree, the animal individuality, pours into 
it its entire vigour. Love is the preference which 
we accord to other beings over ourselves. It 
is not a burst of passion, obscuring the reason, 
but on the contrary no other state of the soul 
is so rational and luminous, so calm and joyous ; 
it is the natural condition of children and the 
wise. 



46 Ibis Hnswec to tbe 

Active love is attainable only for him who 
does not place his happiness in his individual 
life, and who also gives free play to his feeling 
of good-will towards others. His well-being 
depends upon love as that of a plant on light. 
He does not ask what he should do, but he gives 
himself up to that love which is within his reach. 
He who loves in this way alone possesses life. 
Such self-renunciation lifts him from animal 
existence in time and space into the regions of 
life. The limitations of time and space are in- 
compatible with the idea of real life. To attain 
to it man must trust himself to his wings. 

Man's body changes ; his states of conscious- 
ness are successive and differ from each other ; 
what then is the " I " ? Any child can answer 
when he says, "I like this; I don't like that." 
The " I M is that which likes — which loves. It 
is the exclusive relationship of a man's being 
with the world, that relation which he brings 
with him from beyond time and space. It is 
said that in his extreme old age, St. John the 
Apostle had the habit of repeating continually 
the words, " Brethren, love one another." 
His animal life was nearly gone, absorbed in 
a new being for which the flesh was already too 
narrow. For the man who measures his life 
by the growth of his relation of love with the 
world, the disappearance at death of the 
limitations of time and space is only the mark 
of a higher degree of light. 



1Ri&Me of Xife 41 

My brother, who is dead, acts upon me now 
more strongly than he did in life ; he even pene- 
trates my being and lifts me up towards him. 
How can I say that he is dead. Men who have 
renounced their individual happiness never 
doubt their immortality. Christ knew that He 
would continue to live after His death because 
He had already entered into the true life which 
cannot cease. He lived even then in the rays of 
that other centre of life toward which He was 
advancing, and He saw them reflected on those 
who stood around Him. And this every man 
who renounces his own good beholds ; he passes 
in this life into a new relation with the world for 
which there is no death ; on one side he sees 
the new light, on the other he witnesses its 
actions on his fellows after being refracted 
through himself ; and this experience gives 
him an immovable faith in the stability, immor- 
tality, and eternal growth of life. Faith in 
immortality cannot be received from another ; 
you cannot convince yourself of it by argument. 
To have this faith you must have immortality ; 
you must have established with the world in the 
present life the new relation of life, which the 
world is no longer wide enough to contain. 



The above abstract gives a most inadequate 
idea of Count Tolstoy's philosophy of life, but 
it is sufficient to bring out the salient points^ 



42 t)is Hnswet to tbe 

to wit, his idea of the failure of man's ordinary 
life, of the necessity, in the course of nature, 
of loving self-renunciation, and of the resulting 
growth in iove, and the realization of immor- 
tality on earth. 

" But this is sheer mysticism/' is doubtless the 
first objection. Yes, it assuredly is, but that 
is no argument against it. Mysticism is nothing 
but the recognition of the miserable world as 
a palpable fact, and not as an abstract theory. 
All religions had their origin in mysticism, and 
in so far as they have wandered away from it, 
just so far have they fallen into formalism. 
Mysticism is really religion at first hand, such 
as the faith of General Gordon, who used to say 
that he believed in the " real presence," mean- 
ing, as he explained, the actual manifestation 
of God in his own soul. It is not becoming for 
those at least who profess to put their con- 
fidence in Him who said, " The kingdom of God 
is within you," to quarrel with the man who 
finds it there. In short, all Christians should be 
more or less mystics. 

If, then, admitting that the treatise On Life is 
in fact mystical, we compare it with the w r orks 
of those to whom the name of mystic is usually 
given, we are at once struck by the remarkable 
sanity of the Russian author. The practice 
of exploring the unseen world is often dangerous 
for those who attempt it, but Count Tolstoy 
has escaped the vagaries of Boehmen, the 



IRi&Me of Xife 43 

visions of Swedenborg, and the hysterical ex- 
cesses of St. Theresa. And the reason of his 
freedom from these extravagances is not far to 
seek. He opens a door into the vestibule, but 
it is not the door of mere contemplation, of 
quietism, of retirement into self. There is 
something morbid in the very idea of making 
deliberate excursions into another sphere. 
Here lies the mistake of the Christian ascetics, 
of the Persian Sufis, of the Hindoo Buddhists, 
and of the Theosophists of to-day. We may 
well suspect any form of religion which with- 
draws a man's interests and labours from this 
world ; its corner-stone must be selfishness in 
spite of any disguises. 

Tolstoy's door to the mysteries, however, is 
simply active love for mankind. According to 
him, preoccupation in working for the happiness 
of others has a reflex action in the depth of our 
being which makes us feel eternal life. It is this 
intensely practical side of his mysticism which 
preserves his equilibrium. He simply says to 
us : " Renounce your selfish ends ; love all 
men — all creatures — and devote your life to 
them. You will then be conscious of possess- 
ing eternal life, and for you there will be no 
death." 

So much for Count Tolstoy's philosophy of 
life. For some reason it took hold of me with 
a strange power. I was still a church member 
and went regularly to church, but I had no 



44 ftrts Hnswec to tbe 

genuine faith, and was not sure of anything in- 
tangible, and now the simple teaching that it is 
man's higher nature to love — that if he would 
only let himself love and renounce his selfish aims, 
he would enter a wider sphere, find his immortal 
soul, and in fact be born again— all this struck 
me as a great new discovery. I leaned back in 
my study chair ; I tried to love, and — could I 
believe my own sensations ? — I did actually feel 
that I had risen to a loftier plane, and that 
there was something immortal within me. I 
remember going out into the garden and giving 
a small coin — a half piastre — to a little 
Soudanese boy who was playing there, and it 
seemed to me that no act of mine had ever given 
me so much pleasure, and for weeks after the 
novelty of the experience of loving was a con- 
tinual delight. Nor was the change merely 
temporary, for since that day the world has 
never looked to me quite as it used to, 

It is in the light of Tolstoy's teaching in this 
book On Life, that we must approach his ethical 
works, My Confession, What to Do, The Kingdom 
of God is Within You, and the rest, for they all 
have their source in the religious conceptions 
of the former book. 

In the same way in the Gospels themselves, 
from which Tolstoy derives at once his principles 
and his practice, we find different phases of 
thought in the different books. The Evan- 
gelists draw truth from the same well, but some 



1Ri&Me of Xife 45 

let down their buckets deeper than others. St. 
Luke is a practical hand-book for social re- 
formers, and none more radical has been pub- 
lished since his day, but he scarcely reaches 
the source of the spring. He condemns riches 
as stoutly as Tolstoy ; he, too, puts poverty upon 
a pinnacle, but from his Gospel alone we should 
hardly guess the reason why. It was left for 
St. John to lay open the divine source of self- 
sacrifice and to make known once for all the 
infinite power of love restoring men to unity 
with God and with each other, and he does it 
almost without reference to the practical results 
in life which the inspiration of that power must 
accomplish. St. Luke's Gospel is the necessary 
complement of St. John's. 

Some one has said that as St. Peter first led 
the Apostolic Church, and then St. Paul, and 
finally St. John, so in the history of the Christian 
Era, St. Peter, represented by the Catholic 
Church, was the first leader, and after him St. 
Paul, the apostle of Protestantism and justifi- 
cation by faith, and that now again it is the day 
of St. John, the apostle of Love. There is 
much truth in this parallel. It is the spirit of 
St. John, which is, if I mistake not, the Age- 
Spirit of our times, the spirit with which Tolstoy 
is so impregnated. Does then this philosophy of 
St. John, which the Russian has adopted, give 
logical coherence to the seeming extravagances 
of his practical teaching, just as the Fourth 



46 ITbe Basis of bis 

Gospel supplies the motive for the startling 
injunctions of the Third ? 



CHAPTER IV 

The Basis of his Moral and Social Code 

Tolstoy takes as the basis of his practical 
moral system the five injunctions of Christ in 
the fifth chapter of St. Matthew. These are 
the five commandments which should, he thinks, 
supersede the decalogue. 

I. "Ye have heard that it was said to them 
of old time, Thou shalt not kill ; and whosoever 
shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment ; 
but I say unto you, that every one who is angry 
with his brother shall be in danger of the judg- 
ment ; and whososever shall say to his brother, 
Raca, shall be in danger of the council ; and 
whosoever shall say, Thou Fool, shall be in 
danger of hell fire " (v. 21-2). 

II. "Ye have heard that it was said, Thou 
shalt not commit adultery ; but I say unto you, 
that every one that looketh on a woman to lust 
after her hath committed adultery with her 
already in his heart " (v. 27-8). 

III. " Again, ye have heard that it was said 
to them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear 



/IDoral an& Social Cofce 47 

thyself but shalt perform unto the Lord thine 
oaths ; but I say unto you, swear not at all ; 
neither by the heavens, for it is the throne of 
God ; nor by the earth, for it is the footstool of 
His feet ; nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of 
the great King. Neither shalt thou swear by 
thy head, for thou canst not make one hair white 
or black. But let your speech be, Yea, yea ; 
nay, nay ; and whatsoever is more than these 
is of the evil one " (v. 33-7). 

IV. " Ye have heard that it was said, An eye 
for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth ; but I say 
unto you, resist not him that is evil ; but who- 
soever smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to 
him the other also. And if any man would go 
to law with thee, and take away thy coat, let 
him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall 
compel thee to go one mile, go with him twain. 
Give to him that asketh thee, and from him 
that would borrow of thee turn not thou away " 
(v. 38-42). 

V. " Ye have heard that it was said, Thou 
shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy ; 
but I say unto you, love your enemies, and pray 
for them that persecute you ; that you may 
be sons of your Father which is in Heaven : for 
He makethHis sun to rise on the evil and the 
good, and sendeth rain on the just and the un- 
just. For if ye love them that love you, what 
reward have ye ? Do not even the publicans 
the same ? And if ye salute your brethren only, 



48 TTbe Basis of bis 

what do ye more than others ? Do not even 
the Gentiles the same ? Ye therefore shall be 
perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.' ' 

Whether or not these five injunctions form, 
as Count Tolstoy supposes, a complete and 
logical statement covering the whole field of 
morals — and I confess that they do not seem 
to me to combine together and supplement 
each other as perfectly as he thinks, although 
they are all absolutely consistent with each 
other — in any event they form a convenient 
introduction to a consideration of Tolstoy's 
views. 

The first commandment, not to be angry 
with one's brother, used to read in the authorized 
version, " Whoever is angry with his brother 
without a cause." The revised version has 
omitted the qualifying words " without a 
cause " upon the ground that the best manu- 
scripts do not contain them. The insertion of 
these words is a fair example of the way in 
which the Gospels have been toned down to 
suit the prejudices of its readers. Such altera- 
tions were perhaps mere marginal comments 
and may afterwards have been copied into the 
text by mistake. We should then never be 
angry with our brother ; we should treat all 
mankind with brotherly love ; we should apply 
to no one an expression of contempt, such as 
Raca, and thou fool. It is by standing aloof 
from others, by refusing to recognize them as 



flboralanb Social Co&e 49 

equals, by class distinctions, in short, that 
brotherly love is chiefly imperilled, and it is 
against these class distinctions, as the main 
source of enmity between men, that Tolstoy 
sets himself. 

" I know now," he says, " that it is only he 
who humbles himself before others, who works 
for others, that stands above the rest. I un- 
derstand now that what is highly esteemed 
by men is abomination in the sight of God, 
and why woe is foretold to the rich and famous, 
why beggars and those that are humble are the 
blessed. ... I can no longer try to rise above 
other men, to separate myself from them, nor 
can I admit either rank or title for myself or 
others, except the title of ' man.' I can no 
longer seek fame and glory, nor can I help 
trying to get rid of my riches which separate 
me from my fellow-creatures. I cannot help 
seeking in my way of life, in its surroundings, 
in my food, my clothes, my manners, to draw 
nearer the majority of men, and to avoid all 
that separates me from them." 

The second commandment condemns lust in 
the heart and goes on to forbid the putting 
away of one's wife " saving for the cause of forni- 
cation " (v. 32). This exception is not made 
either in St. Mark or in St. Luke (Mark x., 2-12 ; 
Luke xvi. 18), and it seems very clear to me, 
although the revised version retains the words, 
that they were introduced into the text in the 

D 



50 Ube Basis of bis 

same way as the words " without a cause " 
in the first commandment. Christ enjoins 
purity of mind upon all, and absolute fidelity 
in thought as well as deed between husband 
and wife, and this teaching Tolstoy accepts 
in its fulness. " Monogamy/ ' he says, " is the 
natural law of mankind.' ' 

His novel, the Kreutzer Sonata, was attacked 
on the ground that it condemned marriage 
altogether, and it is true that he only admits 
physical marriage as made necessary by the 
hardness of our hearts. Physical love is, he 
tells us, a mere animal passion, and as such un- 
worthy of the highest manhood. " The ideal 
of the Christian is not marriage, but the love 
of God and one's neighbour. ,, It is certainly 
true, whether we lean to these conclusions of 
Tolstoy's or not, that the last word has not yet 
been said on the subject of Christian marriage. 
No sufficient commentary has yet been written 
on the sayings of Christ on this subject (see 
Matt. xix. 10-12 ; Luke xiv. 26), nor upon the 
bearing of his example. I will only add that 
Tolstoy does not seem to have considered the 
possibility of a true spiritual marriage and of 
the effect it might produce in purifying physical 
relations. His views appear to be almost 
identical with those of Saint Paul. 

The Gospel presents us, in common with all 
religions, a mystical view of the sex, which the 
commentator cannot ignore. We are so fami- 



ZlDoral ant) Social Co&e 5 1 

liar with the image of bride and bridegroom as 
applied to Christ and the Church, that we 
miss its significance. In the same way Jehovah 
and Israel are continually pictured as husband 
and wife. Osiris in Egypt, Dionysus in Hellas, 
the givers of wine, are the male gods of the 
mysteries ; and Isis and Ceres, the givers of 
bread, are their spouses. It is a curious fact 
that the bread and wine have in like manner 
become the elements of the Christian feast, and 
in the ancient Teachings of the Twelve Apostles 
we are told that the bread stands for the Church, 
the bride, while the wine represents our Lord. 
Thus in the " communion " between Christian 
and Christian, and between them and God the 
idea of sex is not wanting. It is not fair to 
say that these conceptions were entirely foreign 
to Christ and that they were introduced into 
Christianity after he had passed away, for they 
are anticipated in many of his sayings. We 
may reasonably infer that sex held a larger 
place in the thoughts of Jesus than Tolstoy 
allows. 

The third commandment of Christ is : 
" Swear not at all," supplanting the old in- 
junction that men should perform their oaths. 
Our author regards this commandment as 
having special reference to the oath of allegiance, 
which in Russia is required of every subject. 
We swear to obey the commands of men, and 
those commands may be contrary to the laws 



52 XTbe 3Basts of bis 

of God. This principle of refusing to bind our- 
selves for the future has a wide scope. Fifty 
years ago Thoreau had evolved the idea on the 
banks of Walden Pond, although he evidently 
did not have the Gospels in mind. He says : 
" Must the citizen even for a moment or in 
the least degree resign his conscience to the 
legislator ? Why has every man a conscience 
then ? I think we should be men first and 
subjects afterwards. It is not desirable to 
cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for 
the right. The only obligation which I have a 
right to assume is to do at any time what I think 
right." (Essay on Civil Disobedience.) 

The Concord Diogenes had doubtless in view 
an oath to support a constitution which sanc- 
tioned slavery. Would not such an oath to-day 
require us to take part in an unjust war ? 
Does not an oath to perform the duties of an 
executor, for instance, force us to treat debtors 
severely instead of forgiving them, or even 
treating them mercifully ? Whatever Christ 
may have meant by this declaration against 
oaths, I contend that Tolstoy is right in insist- 
ing upon it that men shall leave their con- 
sciences free and not bind themselves for the 
future, nor become slaves of their dead selves. 
I must be at liberty at every moment of my 
life to obey my conscience as a man, and not 
excuse myself for wrong-doing under the name 
of citizen, or official, or soldier, or trustee. 



/IDoral ant) Social Gobc 53 

By assuming such functions irrevocably we 
stifle our personal sense of right and wrong, 
and in order that we may not shock ourselves 
too much we divide and subdivide our responsi- 
bilities until no one man feels that he is answer- 
able for what he does. If judge and jury had 
to hang the prisoner themselves in cold blood, 
there would be fewer executions ; if we each had 
to butcher our own meat, there would be a great 
increase in the number of vegetarians. If we 
v/ere obliged to evict our own tenants and sell 
out our own debtors, the courts would lose 
much of their business. 

Richard Wagner, who was a great thinker 
as well as a great composer, agrees with Thoreau 
and Tolstoy in the matter of oaths. He says 
(Jesus of Nazareth, a Poetic Draught, part II. 
Wagner's Prose Works, vol. viii. p. 299 ; trans- 
lation of W. A. Ellis) : " ' Ye shall not swear ' ; 
in oaths lay the binding law of a world that 
knew not love as yet. Let every man be free 
to act at every moment according to love and 
his ability ; bound by an oath, I am unfree ; 
if in its fulfilment I do good, that good is robbed 
of merit (as every bounden virtue) and loses 
the worth of conviction ; but if the oath leads 
me to evil, then I sin against conviction. The 
oath engenders every vice ; if it binds me against 
my profit, I shall seek to circumvent it (as 
every law is circumvented) and what I should 
quite rightly do in pursuance of my welfare, 



54 TTbe Basis of bis 

through the oath becomes a crime ; but if I 
find my profit in it (without doing harm to 
another) then I rob myself of the moral satis- 
faction of doing right at every instant through 
my own free judgment. ,, 

If I understand correctly Tolstoy's inter- 
pretation of the law against oaths, it is broadly 
this, that we should never do anything which 
offends our consciences in our simple capacity 
of men and women. We cannot shift that 
responsibility upon society. We cannot con- 
scientiously say : " We know that it is wrong 
to take rent, or interest, or to kill, or to do this 
or that, but so long as society authorizes us 
to do so, it is society's fault." This is not the 
Christian method, for the Christian does not 
cast his sins upon others, but he takes the 
sins of others upon himself. He is responsible 
for them, but they are not responsible for him. 

The fourth commandment is the real key- 
stone of Tolstoy's ethics. It is " Resist not 
him that is evil," and he thus enlarges upon it : 
" Never resist evil by violence ; never return 
violence for violence. If any one smites thee, 
bear it ; if any one takes away what is thine- 
let him have it ; if any one make thee labour, 
do so." 

It is a mistake, says Tolstoy, to suppose that 
our welfare can be secured by defending our- 
selves and our property against others. The 
greater part of the evil of the world arises 



/IDoval anfc Social Cofce ss 

from our effort to make men work for us by 
force. " I now understand the meaning of the 
words ' Man is born not to be ministered unto 
but to minister/ : : : If I now feel tempted 
to defend myself or others, my own property 
or that of others, by violence, I can no longer 
give way to the temptation. I dare not amass 
riches for myself. I dare not use violence of 
any kind against my fellow-creatures, except, 
perhaps, against a child in order to save it from 
present harm ; nor can I now take part in any 
act of authority whose purpose it is to protect 
men's property by violence. I can neither be 
judge nor take part in judging and condemn- 
ing/ ' And thus Tolstoy does not confine the 
application of this rule to our private behaviour: 

The verse in St. Matthew reads : " Ye have 
heard that it was said, an eye for an eye and a 
tooth for a tooth, but I say unto you resist not 
him that is evil." The " eye for an eye and 
tooth for a tooth " doctrine is thrice enunciated 
in the law of Moses (Ex; xxi. 24 ; Lev. xxiv. 20 ; 
Deut. xix. 21) and in each case it is embodied 
in a provision of the criminal code. Christ offers 
the rule of non-resistance, therefore, as a sub- 
stitute for the criminal law, and it applies pri- 
marily to the official deeds of the government. 
Tolstoy unreservedly adopts this view. For 
him all government by force is wrong. 

Let us consider for a moment if this principle 
of non-resistance is sound: Even if Jesus en 



56 Ube Basis of bis 

joined such conduct,- this is not sufficient of 
itself to force upon a Christian a course of con- 
duct which offends his judgment. We are so 
constituted that we cannot accept from outside 
a moral obligation which does not appeal to 
our deepest sense of right. Our morality must 
be a living branch of our own life, and a graft 
that has no affinity with us and cannot find 
a new source of life in our inmost being, must 
be rejected no matter whence it comes. How 
is it then with this doctrine of non-resistance ? 
Does it or does it not appeal to our innermost 
nature ? 

Each of us must answer this question for 
himself, assuring himself at the same time, as 
he best can, that none of his lower instincts 
affect his decision. I can only express my 
belief that the deeper we probe into our con- 
sciousness, the clearer the wisdom of that 
method will appear to us. We shall see that 
it has called forth a response in the past from 
some of the noblest of men, and there is every 
reason to believe that at the present day an 
ever increasing number of persons feel the truth 
of this teaching and the necessity of its applica- 
tion if the Kingdom of God is ever to come. If 
this is so, we can readily conceive that armed 
resistance on our part may become in time as 
abhorrent to us as it was, I believe, abhorrent 
to Christ. May it not be that in the future it will 
become as impossible for a Christian to con- 



/Doral anb Social Co&e 57 

demn another to death, or evict a tenant, or 
fire a bomb-shell at his fellows, as it would be 
for him now to indulge in an act of can- 
nibalism ? 

Nor would this be a weak surrender to senti- 
ment. Violence cannot be stopped by vio- 
lence. We have been trying to do this impos- 
sible feat for thousands of years, and to-day 
Europe has more soldiers and engines of war 
than ever, and in the United States there are 
over 10,000 homicides a year, while we all know 
that there is enough military spirit even in our 
Sunday Schools to supply several nations of 
savages. This is the result of the eye for an 
eye and tooth for a tooth system, which we 
fondly suppose was abolished by Christ, but 
which we are putting into practice every day of 
our lives quite as relentlessly as the ancient 
Hebrews or the ancient Romans. 

Only a fool would attempt to stop the pen- 
dulum when it swings to the right by pushing 
it as violently to the left, and yet this is the 
chief object of most of our legislation. In 
precisely this way the vendettas of Corsica are 
kept alive between families for centuries. Mur- 
der succeeds murder and the son inherits the 
obligation of kill'ng from his father. Suppose 
in some such case of feud a family had long 
years ago adopted Christ's method and refused 
to exact a life for a life, is it not evident that the 
hatred would have died out, and that just so far 



58 Hbe Basis of bis 

peace, harmony and concord would be estab- 
lished among men ? And so with nations, 
would it not be better to forget Alsace and 
Lorraine than once again to sow the fratricidal 
seed that has so often filled Europe with a 
bloody harvest ? And if this principle is ap- 
plicable to such cases, surely it is equally ap- 
plicable to the ordinary events of life. Some 
one owes you £5. Is it consistent with Christ's 
precepts, or His spirit, to sue him for it ? Is it 
conceivable that Christ would have taken 
such a course Himself ? Apart from all 
Christian consideration, will your lawsuit help 
bring on the era of universal peace, or is it any 
more than another ugly thrust at the same old 
pendulum ? 

No, our method has been radically wrong — 
the method, I mean, of enforcing upon others 
our own opinions on religion and morals, on 
law and order, on property and conduct, and on 
insisting upon their acceptance of our own con- 
ceptions of our own individual rights. If I can 
make all the world agree with me, we shall cer- 
tainly have a golden age, and I start out to 
bring this about by force, either by taking up 
arms myself or by seeking to obtain for my 
opinions the stamp of positive law and thus 
of enforcing them by the mailed hand of govern- 
ment. Now this plan of campaign would work 
very well if I were the only person in the world 
bent upon having my own way, but I find out 



/Ifcoral an& Social Co&e 59 

very soon that every other man and woman on 
earth, with a few exceptions, is engaged in the 
same undertaking, and the result is, as might be 
expected, a state of indescribable confusion in 
which those who succumb receive little con- 
sideration. Every nation acts in the same 
way, and our public, as well as our private, 
relations are hostile. Hence comes the great 
mass of social and industrial suffering with 
which we have to contend and for which we 
must find a remedy. Is it not time to ask 
whether mankind has been attacking the dis- 
ease of society in the proper way, and whether 
we should not make a fundamental change in 
its treatment ? 

Let us for a moment consider the diagnosis of 
the Good Physician. We do not as a rule look 
upon evil as Christ did. When we think of 
murder, we picture to ourselves the sufferings 
of the victim, the bloodshed, the life cut short, 
the bereaved family. Our sympathies make 
these the chief features of the scene, and it is to 
prevent these results of crime that we exert 
ourselves. But Jesus looked deeper. He 
could afford to relegate these pains and sorrows 
to the background, for He discerned something 
worse. He tells us expressly, " Fear not them 
which kill the body but are not able to kill the 
soul." According to Him the great evil is not 
killing but the anger against a brother. The 
problem with Him would be not how to pre- 



60 Qhe Basis ot bis 

vent murder but how to eradicate anger — 
hatred — from the breast of man. 

This then is His diagnosis ; the seat of the 
trouble is in the evil thoughts of men, in envy, 
covetousness, hatred, malice, and uncharitable- 
ness. It is against these depraved instincts 
in himself and in others that the Christian 
must direct his energies, if he wishes to heal 
society and to lay the foundations of peace in 
the world. And it is against these evil thoughts 
and imaginings of man that Christ directs 
His remedy of unresisting love, and I submit 
that it has a power, a force, which can never 
be attained by repression or coercion even in 
their most refined forms, and which must be 
abandoned if recourse is had to repression and 
coercion. There is only one effective way of 
attacking evil, and that is to overcome it 
by good. Nor is the abolition of government 
involved. Our principle simply requires the 
abstention of the individual from acts which 
he cannot conscientiously perform. Nothing 
would be abolished until all men came to that 
way of thinking, and a world of non-resistants 
could certainly dispense with government-by- 
force. It is difficult for us to imagine a state 
without police or prisons, and so fifty years ago 
a school without birch-rods, rulers and slippers 
was practically inconceivable. The change in 
school-discipline shows the direction in which 
our civilization is moving. 



/IDoral an& Social CoDe 61 

Walt Whitman in one of his short poems 
presents the idea of the relation of the indi- 
vidual to civil institutions in what seems to me 
a truly Christian way. He says : 

" I hear that it was charged against me that I sought 

to destroy institutions, — 
But really I am neither for nor against institutions 
(What indeed have I in common with them ? or 

what with the destruction of them ?), 
Only I will establish in the Mannahatta and in 

every city of these States, inland and sea-board, — 
And in the fields and woods, and above every keel, 

little and large, that dents the water, 
Without edifices or rules or any argument, — 
The institution of the Dear Love of Comrades.' - 

Nor is the principle of non-resistance cowardly 
or effeminate. The examples which we shall 
cite will prove that, and indeed it is sufficient 
to look at the tall stalwart figure of Count 
Tolstoy, the veteran of the Crimea, as he dares 
the Russian bear to do its worst, to satisfy 
us that his religion must be manly. But even 
if we had no examples to point to, we might 
assure ourselves of the manliness of non- 
resistance by arguing from the very nature of 
men. 

The first requisite of courage is self-forget- 
fulness, and the first requisite of self-forgetful- 
ness is a preponderating care of others, and 
this we call love. Thus it is true in the broadest 
sense that perfect love casteth out fear, and 



62 TTfoe JSasis of bis 

the man who refrains from exerting force upon 
his neighbour because he loves him is the least 
likely of all men to fear for himself. This 
courage which springs from love is the courage 
which differentiates the man from the brute. 
It derives its power from the region of affections 
and thoughts, of love and truth, of heart and 
mind, which region is the proper home of the 
human soul. All our physical actions which 
do not find their motive power in that higher 
plane, are merely the deeds of animals, and in 
such deeds we can be eclipsed by the first bull- 
dog or tiger. 

But, we are told, the doctrine of non-resist- 
ance would prevent us from interfering to pre- 
vent the murder of a child, and this is clearly a 
reductio ad absurdam of the whole principle. 
It is probably true that few non-resistants 
would carry out their theory to this extent in 
practice, but the fact is that not one man in 
a million is ever placed in such a situation, 
while the evils of violence and force are ever 
present with us in all the injustices and in- 
equalities of society, in the miseries of war, and 
in almost every incident of our lives. Besides, 
every principle of morality may be pushed to 
an extreme at which its application may seem 
doubtful, and yet the principle itself remain 
unquestioned. Thus we all admit the moral 
obligation of truthfulness, but, because it may 
be contented that a falsehood is justifiable to 



/Ifcoral anfc Social Gofce 63 

save life, we do not for that reason throw the 
principle overboard, and begin to lie indis- 
criminately. The fact, therefore, that we 
might feel bound to defend a child from out- 
rage, even by violence, is no justification for 
the settlement of minor disputes by the legal 
or illegal use of force. The real test is love, and 
in the vast majority of cases in which we resort 
to force our conscience would tell us, if we paused 
to listen to it, that our act is inconsistent with 
love — that it necessarily involves a certain 
degree of hatred or ill-will. 

But are we, burning though we be with a 
desire to establish the kingdom of God, to re- 
nounce all the ordinary means of improvement 
with which civilization has made us acquainted ? 
Can we improve the world without recourse to 
legislation, and judges and armies, and sheriffs 
and prisons ? Christ certainly found no use 
for these methods. There was far more govern- 
ment in His day than there is now. He was 
surrounded by Roman and Hebrew national 
and municipal institutions, but He never at- 
tempted to apply them to His purposes. Only 
once did the idea occur to Him of using them, 
and this was when the tempter showed Him all 
the kingdoms of the world and the glory of 
them and said, " All these things will I give 
Thee, if Thou wilt fall down and worship me." 
We all remember Christ's reply, " Get thee 
behind Me, Satan." And He never presented a 



64 ftbe JBasis ot bis 

different view of the power of government. 
" Ye know that they which are accounted to 
rule over the Gentiles lord it over them, and 
their great ones exercise authority over them. 
But it shall not be so among you." 

" But/' we rejoin, " these are things which 
we have always been taught to regard as the 
greatest and most important on earth." Quite 
so, and so Jesus says, " That which is highly 
esteemed among men is abomination in the 
sight of God." Nor would the acceptance of 
Christ's teachings necessarily imply an amor- 
phous condition of society, a mad revel of indi- 
vidualism, nor anarchy, nor disorder. 

Christianity means union and order, but the 
union must be organic and not mechanical, a 
growth and not an institution. It must be a 
living union, transcending the idea of kingship, 
passing even beyond the nobler conception of 
fatherhood and brotherhood, and reaching the 
ideal of actual identity, such as Jesus felt 
when He prayed that we might be one with Him 
as He was one with the Father, and when He 
declared, " Inasmuch as ye have done it unto 
the least of these My brethren, ye have done it 
unto Me." 

In cultivating our sense of this oneness, in 
preaching boldly the consequences of its appli- 
cation to our social life, in protesting against 
every infringement of the law of love which it 
predicates, lies the true field of activit)' for the 



/Ifcoral anfc Social Co&e 65 

Christian reformer. To hold up the noblest 
ideal, trusting to its inherent persuasiveness, 
and abjuring all coercion — that is, believe me, 
the highest function of man, and history will 
show us that it has the most durable practical 
consequences. The Lord is not in the wind nor 
in the whirlwind, but in the still small voice, 
and the very climax of the New Testament 
shows us the Lamb upon the throne. 

We can make no greater mistake than to lift 
our hand against wrong. The man who will 
not strike back is the only man who cannot be 
conquered, and the treatment of him becomes 
an insoluble problem for the tyrant. It is the 
non-resistant alone who can overcome superior 
power. Nor in the long run will he be per- 
secuted beyond endurance. Count Tolstoy 
says : "If all the members of a family were 
Christians and gave up their lives to the service 
of others, no one would despoil them or kill 
them, ,, and he says in another place that people 
who take care of their dogs because they are 
useful, will not, even if they have no higher 
motive, continue long to oppress those who, 
cheerfully do good to them. 

That the idea of non-resistance touches a 
chord in the human heart I can testify from 
my own experience. I have never presented 
it to an audience without having their sym- 
pathies, and I have presented it to audiences of 
all kinds. I recall one occasion on which I 



66 Basis of bis flDoral anfc Social Cofce 

debated the proposition, " Resolved, that the 
doctrine of non-resistance to evil tends to re- 
enforce evil and to invite disaster/' before a 
club of New York u society " ladies. So cer- 
tain was I that I could have no influence upon 
them that I did all I could to avoid the dis- 
cussion, but without effect. The affirmative 
was sustained with marked ability and con- 
viction, but to my surprise, when the merits of 
the question (not of the debate) were put to 
the vote at the close of the meeting there were 
thirty- four votes in the negative to fourteen in 
the affirmative. And I think that at any 
average meeting the result would not be very 
different. 

We still have the fifth commandment to con- 
sider, but we may dismiss it with a word. 
It is " Love your enemies. " Tolstoy makes 
the word " enemies " mean national enemies or 
foreigners, and in this he is undoubtedly mis- 
taken, but, however that may be, this rule pre- 
scribes brotherly love towards all men, even 
those we are most disposed to hate, whether 
for national or personal reasons. It would 
condemn much that passes for patriotism, just 
as it condemns much that passes for honour and 
self-respect. 



Ibis Geacbfiig ZTeste& 67 



CHAPTER V 

HIS TEACHING TESTED BY THE CHRISTIAN 
SPIRIT 

I have now given a general view of Count 
Tolstoy's opinions. Do they fairly represent, 
as he thinks they do, the teachings of Christ ? 
It certainly seems to me that he goes no further 
than Jesus did. It is obviously true no portion 
of the Gospel or of any other book is to be inter- 
preted according to the letter irrespective of 
the spirit. The object of language is to put 
the hearer into the same mental and spiritual 
position that is occupied by the speaker, so 
that he may see the subject from the same 
standpoint and in the same spirit. Now, to 
what spirit do Christ's words in the Sermon on 
the Mount inevitably point ? 

Non-resistance to bad men, turning the other 
cheek to the aggressor, the refusal to defend 
our dearest property by law, the loosening of 
our purse strings, the love going forth like the 
sunlight to the very margin of the universe and 
including all men, even our enemies and per- 
secutors ; what spirit do these things indicate 



68 UMs xceacbfitfl XCesteD 

if it be not a spirit of entire indifference to 
accumulated property — a spirit living in an 
atmosphere so pure that no insult or injury can 
disturb it — a spirit whose intense love for the 
offender outweighs all other considerations ? 
And if we should endeavour to cultivate this 
spirit, would it not lead us to an almost literal 
fulfilment of these very words of Christ ? I 
see no escape from the conclusion that Christ's 
language here means what it purports to mean. 
If it is hyperbolical and exaggerated, has it any 
meaning at all and is it not hopelessly mis- 
leading ? When Jesus sets up standards that 
seem too high for us we ascribe it to Oriental 
imagery. Moses and St. Paul and St. John 
were also Orientals, but we interpret their writ- 
ings literally, and why should we apply a differ- 
ent canon to the sayings of Christ ? No, it is 
evident on the face of the Sermon on the Mount 
that He meant what He said. 

But these statements in these three chapters 
of St. Matthew are not exceptional. The 
spirit of non-resistance, of indifference to 
property, breathe throughout His discourses. 
The twelve, and afterwards the seventy, are 
to carry no gold nor silver nor brass ; ... no 
wallet . . ., neither two coats, no shoes nor 
staff. " To great multitudes " He says, " Who- 
soever he be of you that renounceth not all 
that he hath, he cannot be My disciple. " When 
a man asks Him to bid his brother divide the 



b2 tbe Christian Spirit 6 9 

inheritance with him, He calls this desire to 
get one's own property " covetousness." In 
another place He says, " Sell all that ye have 
and give alms." He teaches us to pray, "For- 
give us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.' ' 
He says : " Blessed are the poor " and " Woe 
unto you that are rich." To the young ruler 
he says, " Sell all that thou hast and distribute 
unto the poor." 

We are often told that covetousness was this 
man's besetting sin, but those who build upon 
this guess forget that we have seen Christ 
twice give the same advice to large audiences, 
for covetousness is, in fact, the besetting sin 
of the human race. He says that only with 
God is it possible for a rich man to enter the 
Kingdom of Heaven — that is, of course, to 
enter into his proper relations with his fellow- 
men on this earth — but He nowhere hints that 
he can do it without getting rid of his 
riches. 

Do we ask why Christ draws a sharp line 
between rich and poor ? I believe that the 
distinction should be intuitive in the Christian 
soul. There is nothing more deadening to true 
life than wealth and purple and fine linen and 
the accompanying pride. We can each of us 
test the truth for ourselves. There is on a 
Sunday morning in any of our East Side Catho- 
lic Churches in New York a Christian feeling of 
communion and communism which is not to be 



?o HMs Ueacblng Uestefc 

found in a fashionable congregation. It is 
possible to feel the brotherhood of man in East 
Broadway or Hester Street as it cannot be felt 
on Fifth Avenue. These are simple facts and 
we cannot understand the life of Christ until 
we appreciate how deeply He was imbued 
with this feeling. Dante beautifully expresses 
the relation of Jesus to the poor when he says 
that after He passed from earth Poverty re- 
mained widowed until St. Francis took her to 
his bosom — 

" Questa, privata dal primo marito, Mille e 
cento anni e piu dispetta e scura Fino a costui si 
stette senza invito." 

Jesus bids the disciples too, w T hen persecuted, 
not to resist. They are to carry no staff, and 
to " Flee into another city." And when James 
and John wished to call down vengeance, He 
rebuked them and said, " Ye know not what 
manner of spirit ye are of." When attacked 
Himself He rebuked Peter who attempted to 
resist : " Put up again thy sword into its place, 
for all they that take the sword shall perish by 
the sword," thus nullifying completely the 
words contained only in St. Luke : " He that 
hath none let him sell his cloak, and buy a 
sword." Let us note that Peter was not even 
acting in self-defence, but the far nobler de- 
fence of his Master. Again He says : " He that 
loveth his life, loseth it," and " Be not afraid 
of them which kill the body." We may see 



bs tbe Cbristian Spirit 7* 

from these sayings of Christ that they exhibit 
a remarkable consistency and sustain his posi- 
tion in the Sermon on the Mount. 

Let us also for a moment consider Christ's 
actions and see to what extent they agree with 
His words. Although frequently in danger 
of violence, He never resisted. His attitude 
as to property is well summed up by Dr. Thomp- 
son in The Land of the Book : 

" With uncontrolled power to possess all, 
He owned nothing. He had no place to be 
born in but another man's stable, no closet to 
pray in but the wilderness, no place to die but 
on the cross of an enemy, and no grave but one 
lent by a friend. At His death He had ab- 
solutely nothing to bequeath to His mother: 
He was as free from the mercenary spirit as 
though He had belonged to a world where the 
very idea of property was unknown. And this 
total abstinence from all ownership was not of 
necessity but of choice, and I say there is 
nothing like it, nothing that approaches it in 
the history of universal man. It stands out 
perfectly and divinely original" (p. 407). 

Jesus was the greatest of reformers. He was 
a Jew, living in Palestine under the most op- 
pressive and unjust yoke of the Romans. The 
people continually rebelled and wished Him to 
lead their rebellion, and in fact this wish of 
theirs caused His death. And yet He never by 
a word or act approved of their resistance to 



ji Ibis UcachiwQ Uesteb 

the Roman power, and even justified the pay- 
ment of tribute. 

The only occasion on which He is alleged ever 
to have used force, is in driving the money 
changers from the Temple, but the whip of 
small cords is only mentioned in St. John, and 
he alone mentions also the sheep and oxen. It 
is evident that the whip was merely used as 
the ordinary method of driving the cattle. 
And furthermore the cleansing of the Temple 
did not succeed. It was in submission unto 
death that Christ conquered. 

We conclude from all the foregoing, that 
Christ by word and deed condemned all forcible 
resistance, and we find that He carried this 
out to its logical results. 

Government reposes upon force, hence the 
Christian should not share in governing. And 
this is just what Jesus says : " Ye know that 
they which are accounted to rule over the 
Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and their 
great ones exercise authority upon them, but 
so shall it not be among you" 

Governments engage frequently in war, but a 
Christian should not take part in war, and so 
Christ says : " If My kingdom were of this 
world, then would My servants fight/ ' He 
says : " Judge not," and He shows what He 
means by refusing to adjudicate on the con- 
tested inheritance, and by refusing to con- 
demn the guilty woman, and in both cases 



by tbe Christian Spirit 73 

setting aside the law of Moses. And in fact, 
as we have seen, He attacks the foundations of 
that law by expressly enjoining non-resistance 
as a substitute for the lex talionis. 

After examining Christ's words and example 
we cannot easily escape the conviction that 
Tolstoy has entered into their meaning far 
more fully than the accepted commentators 
of any church, and the arguments which are 
used to show that Christ did not mean what 
He said may be applied with equal force to 
Tolstoy's writings, and perhaps before he has 
been dead many years we shall have books 
published to show that the Russian reformer, 
like his Master, had no objection to riches or 
violence. 

The position taken by most Christians that 
Jesus made it a rule to say what He did not 
mean is fast becoming untenable. Common in- 
tellectual honesty before long will have com- 
pletely undermined it. We must choose be- 
tween Christ plus His teachings on the one hand 
and an honest paganism on the other. I once 
read the portions of the Sermon on the Mount 
which refer to turning the other cheek and 
giving up one's cloak to my nine-year old boy 
with the object of getting his opinion. His 
response was brief and to the point. " Oh, 
what stuff," was the only comment. I value 
this answer as a frank expression of judgment. 
If every Christian who, in the bottom of his 



74 Uhc Christian tTeacbtno 

heart, believes that these injunctions are " stuff " 
would cordially say so, it would be a great gain 
to the cause of truthfulness, whatever the 
result might be on the dogma of the inspira- 
tion of the Gospels; 



CHAPTER VI 

THE CHRISTIAN TEACHING IN PRACTICE 

Are the injunctions of Christ practicable ? We 
can only answer that they have often proved so, 
and we find the clearest answer in the history 
of Christianity itself. If St. Peter's plan of 
defence by the sword had been adopted, pagan 
Rome would have conquered in an hour, but 
by resolutely refusing to strike back under the 
severest provocation, the little band of Chris- 
tians finally overcame the Empire with all its 
legions; the meek actually did inherit the earth ; 
and Jesus was so sure of the success of His 
method, that He could say, " Fear not, little 
flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to 
give you the kingdom.' ' 

And this prophecy is coupled with the com- 
mand to seek first the Kingdom of God and to 
" sell that ye have." The practical power of 



in practice 75 

the same teachings was shown again by Francis 
of Assissi, whose preaching swept over the 
civilized world and did much to heal the cor- 
ruptions of the Church and to create Christian 
art. The achievements of the Quakers must 
also be put down to the credit of non-resistance. 
What other Christian body has such a record 
in social matters ? To them is due the agita- 
tions against war, the increased regard for the 
rights of women, and the abolition of slavery. 
Lloyd Garrison was not a Quaker, but he was 
a non-resistant and one of the most extreme. 
Is it a mere coincidence that this typical non- 
resistant should have been the man who, in 
the history of America, has, without any excep- 
tion, accomplished the most for humanity ? 

At the close of the war, when President Lin- 
coln was congratulated on having liberated the 
slaves, he replied with much truth, that he had 
only been an instrument, and that the moral 
power of Garrison and his followers had done 
all. I must dwell for a moment upon the char- 
acter of Garrison to show what stuff non-re- 
sistants are made of. Let us judge him by the 
first number of the Liberator, which was pub- 
lished on January I, 1831. Garrison had just 
been released from gaol, a penniless youth of 
five-and-twenty, without resources or connex- 
ions. He bought some paper and second- 
hand type on credit ; he and his assistant were 
forced by want to live for many months chiefly 



76 Ube Christian UcachuiQ 

on " bread and milk, a few cakes and a little 
fruit/ ' Their printing office was an attic room 
where they both slept on the floor. From this 
point of vantage, he thundered forth thus in his 
first leading article : 

" The standard is now unfurled ; s : Let 
the enemies of the persecuted blacks tremble. 
. . ; I will be as harsh as Truth and as uncom- 
promising as Justice. ; : ; I am in earnest. I 
will not equivocate ; I will not excuse ; I will 
not retract a single inch ; AND I WILL BE 
HEARD. Posterity will bear testimony that 
I was right/ ' 

And posterity has so borne witness and has 
long since decided that no man ever did a 
man's work in a manlier way than the non- 
resistant Garrison. 

We see from Garrison's case that non- 
resistance does not mean non-interference. 
No class of men has interfered more frequently 
or more effectively than non-resistants. In 
the case of the oppressed Armenians and 
Cubans, as in that of slavery, their voice w r ould 
have been the first to cry out for justice, but 
it would have been a cry and not a blow. 
It was the standing armies of Europe, with the 
international jealousies centreing in them, 
which prevented effectual moral interference 
in Turkey on behalf of Armenia. 

Another interesting example of non-resist- 
ance is given in King's History of Ohio. He 



in practice 77 

devotes one chapter to the Moravians who 
in the eighteenth century went into the 
wilderness to preach this doctrine to the 
savages. Here are King's words : 

" The faith they sought to implant was 
mainly love. To go in this panoply before 
the wild Indians of America, it must be ad- 
mitted, was proof of great faith. . . . Strangely 
the direction thus taken and the sensibilities 
thus appealed to proved to be precisely adapted 
to the Indian nature, and had a power which, 
under different circumstances, might have 
made a different history for the red man." 
This is certainly a remarkable admission for a 
historian who has no brief for non-resistance, 
and is' simply relating the facts as he finds 
them ; but on looking into the records we see 
that these facts fully bear him out in his con- 
clusions. 

One of the leading Delaware warriors, and 
the principal orator of the tribe, Glickhican 
by name, heard of the inroads which the 
Moravians were making among his fellow 
Indians, and he came from a distance to see 
them with the express object of silencing 
them by argument. To the surprise of all 
he was himself convinced, and he laid aside 
his arms and joined them notwithstanding 
the taunts of the other warriors. Many 
others followed his example, and so highly 
were the Moravians honoured by all the Dela- 



78 Ube Cbttstian Ueacblng 

wares that they were adopted as members of 
the tribe. Three villages of non-resistant 
Indians were established and the " lands, 
houses and crops of the colony were common 
property." 

" The neighbouring Indians were soon at- 
tracted by the novel scene. It was not by a 
change of heart only that the brethren counted 
upon the efficacy of their cause. Through 
the door and school of industry they sought 
to draw the Indians to the closer ties of Chris- 
tian peace, order and love." 

" It is easy to perceive . -.- . how the Indians 
were drawn to the Moravians. Goodwill once 
secured, their great aim was to convert the 
savage to their life of peace and love. To ac- 
complish it, these wild sons of the forest were 
constantly urged to turn their thoughts away 
from blood and rapine to the love of Him who 
gave to the world all its humanity, and in 
whose bosom the red man and the white alike 
found rest. The daily hymns and worship, 
which so much engaged the Indians, all the 
exhortations of the preachers, turned upon 
the one great point of compelling them to live 
and die like Him who died rather than resist 
the violence of His enemies. It sought a 
total reverse of their nature. But the Passion 
and Crucifixion, as wrought up in the intense 
and fervent pictures of the Moravian ex- 
torters, seldom failed to rivet the attention 



fit practice 79 

of even the fiercest warrior ; for it was that 
supreme heroism of the captive, in the last 
agony of torture, which was his greatest 
aspiration ; and he was ready to adore it. 

11 While the unregenerate braves looked with 
scorn upon the Christian forgiveness and 
humility which could turn the other cheek 
when struck, yet before this ideal many of 
them yielded, and in silent homage with the 
praying Indians, as they were called, forsook 
the war-path. Among them were a number 
of distinguished chiefs/ ' 

Mr. King thinks that if the Moravians had 
founded their settlement ten years earlier or 
iater, they would have had a permanent effect 
upon the destiny of the American aborigines, 
but they had fallen upon evil times. The 
Revolution broke out in 1775 and from that 
moment efforts were made to drag the Dela- 
ware Indians into the conflict. For five years 
the missionaries and the Christian Indians 
succeeded in persuading them to preserve 
neutrality. A Wyandot embassy came offering 
them the war-belt, but the Delawares answered 
that " they had engaged to hold the chain 
of friendship with both hands, and therefore 
could spare no hands to take hold of the war- 
belt. M The Moravian villagers entertained 
all war-parties hospitably and were not molested 
by them. 

But finally the hostilities of the whites 



so Qhe Christian Heacbincj 

brought disaster upon the missions. Three 
border ruffians arrived who had been confined 
in American prisons and now wished to unite 
all the Indians against their former captors. 
They spread false reports about the mission- 
aries among the red men, and made two at- 
tempts to assassinate them. The Moravians 
found themselves at last obliged to move their 
villages. 

" The hideous truth now dawned upon them 
that, secure as they felt themselves among the 
savages, their real enemies were the whites, 
and that the worst of these were those to 
whom they were most friendly, the Ameri- 
cans." 

The English, believing that the Moravians 
were too friendly to the Americans, instigated 
the Six Nations to drive them out. The 
Indians were forced to this by threats, the 
missionaries were seized and robbed, and the 
houses of the Christian Indians pillaged. 
Glickhican refused to defend himself, and 
was taken prisoner. He was, however, dis- 
charged, and again the Moravians emi- 
grated to another place, where they nearly 
died of starvation. They returned to the site 
of their old village to gather the standing corn, 
and there they were treacherously murdered 
by a band of ninety-six Americans. Glickhican 
was one of those massacred, and to the end 
refused to defend, himself although if he had. 






in practice 81 

raised the war-cry, his reputation as a warrior 
would have given new courage to his com- 
panions, and would perhaps have assured their 
escape. This calamity put an end to the Mora- 
vian missions. 

Another more recent example of the prac- 
ticability of Christ's teachings among savage 
tribes is given by the Rev. Henry Richards, an 
English missionary in the service of the Ameri- 
can Baptist Missionary Society. He went out 
to Banka Mantekel, on the Congo, in 1879, an ^ 
was the first missionary in that neighbourhood. 
He found that the natives were inveterate 
thieves and considered it a compliment to be 
called liars, but cruelty is not one of their faults. 
He says : 

" I do not believe the African is by any means 
naturally a cruel man. I believe the Anglo- 
Saxon to be naturally far more cruel and 
brutal than the African. When graceless 
white men go away from all the restraints of 
society, from public opinion, from the salt of 
the earth, from the direct influence of Chris- 
tianity, they seem to become demons. I have 
seen more brutal things done by one white man 
in one day than I have ever seen done among 
the Africans all the time I have lived among 
them." 

For some years he taught the natives from 
the Old Testament, but with no effect. " I 
began/' he says, " to study the Scriptures and 

F 



82 tTbe Cbtlstian tCeacbino 

to feel that there was some mistake in my 
preaching/ ' He concluded that it was the 
Gospel and not the law which they needed. " I 
considered that the best way to preach the 
Gospel was to take Luke's Gospel, as this 
seemed the most complete and most suit- 
able for Gentiles. I began translating ten or 
twelve verses a day as best I could, and then 
read and expounded them to the people, asking 
God to bless His word. The people were at once 
more interested in the Gospel than when I 
preached the law, for when I preached the law 
the people were evidently irritated and turned 
away from me, as they did not like to be accused 
of sin. When I preached of the Lord Jesus 
coming as a baby, growing up to be a boy, and 
that He went about doing good, the people 
were at once interested, and I began to get 
hopeful, my faith was strengthened, and I 
believed that anybody could be converted. 
This went on very well until I got to the sixth 
chapter of Luke, thirtieth verse, then another 
difficulty arose. I should mention in describ- 
ing the character of the people that they were 
notorious beggars. They would ask for any- 
thing they saw. They would ask for my only 
knife, blanket or plate, and I would say that 
I could not give them to them, and they would 
say, ' You can get more.' They would see me 
write a note and send it down to Palabala and 
things would come up, and they thought the 



in practice 83 

white man, by merely writing a note, could 
get everything he wanted, and wasn't he mean 
and selfish not to give them all they asked for. 
u Now here comes the text , * Give to every one 
that asketh thee.' I had been in the habit of 
taking things in their order. The man who 
helped me with my translating did not see my 
difficulty, and I told him that I did not need 
him further that day, and went to my room and 
prayed. The time for the service was coming 
on. We had daily service, and the thought 
came, why not pass over that verse, and then 
my conscience stung me, which said that that 
would not be honest. Service time came, but 
I did not go on with the Gospel, but went back 
to the beginning, and I thought this would 
give me some time to consider the meaning 
of this text. I could not find that it meant 
anything else than what it said. I consulted a 
commentary. I had often done this before, 
and very often found that it says nothing about 
the very text which I wish to know about, but 
this did say something. It said the Lord is 
speaking on general principles, and we should 
do a great deal of harm, instead of doing good, 
if we were to take it literally, for we should 
give to idlers, drunkards, etc. What the Lord 
Jesus means is simply that you should be kind 
and generous, and give to those who are really 
in need ; but you have also to use your common 
sense. 



84 XCbe Cbristian Ueacbing 

M I thought after reading this, Why did not 
Jesus say just what He meant ? Was He so 
badly educated that He could not express His 
thoughts correctly ? If He does not mean 
what He says here, how can I know that He 
does in other places ? I know that He uses 
figures and parables that may be interpreted 
differently, but here is a text that a child can 
understand, and if this text can be interpreted 
into being kind and generous, why not others 
on the same broad principles ? 

" It we are allowed to interpret Scriptures in 
this way we might teach any doctrine we like 
from them. . . . Then as to common sense, 
there seems to be very little what is ordinarily 
called common sense in the Sermon on the 
Mount. Would common sense ever dictate 
such precepts as these : ' Blessed are the poor/ 
1 the hungry/ ' the weeping/ ' Blessed are ye 
when men shall hate you ? ' Is this according 
to common sense ? Does not common sense 
teach us that we are blessed when we have 
everything and are well off and happy ? We 
are to love those who hate us, and to pray for 
our enemies ; would common sense dictate 
this ? Would common sense say, ' If a man 
strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other. 
Common sense would say, ' If a man strikes 
you on one cheek, you give him another.' 
Would common sense say, ' If thy enemy 
hunger, feed him ? ' Common sense would say, 



in practice s 5 

1 Let him starve and the quicker he is dead the 
better/ ' Lay not up for yourselves treasures 
upon earth, but treasures in heaven/ Does 
not common sense say, ' Lay up a good store 
for this earth, and then talk of spiritual things ? ' 
1 Seek first the Kingdom of Heaven and His 
righteousness.' Does not common sense 
say, ' Secure the dollars by might ? ' .- . ; 

" A missionary passed down at this time, 
and I mentioned to him my difficulty, but he 
smiled and said, ' No one lives up to the Gospel 
literally like that/ and passed on. I never 
have been able to see how it could be under- 
stood figuratively. Our commander has given 
us a very solemn warning at the end of the 
Sermon on the Mount (Luke vi. 46-49) : 
4 And why call ye Me Lord, Lord, and do not 
the things which I say ? Every one that 
cometh unto Me, and heareth My words, and 
doeth them, I will show you to whom he is 
like ; he is like a man building a house, who 
digged and went deep, and laid a foundation 
upon the rock ; and when a flood arose the 
stream brake against that house and could 
not shake it, because it had been well builded. 
But he that heareth and doeth not is like a 
man that built a house upon the earth without 
a foundation, against which the stream brake, 
and straightway it fell in ; and the ruin of that 
house was great.' : . ; 

" After about a fortnight of prayer and con- 



86 Ube Cbrtstian XTeacbing 

sideration, I came to the conclusion that the 
Lord Jesus meant just what He said, and I went 
and read it to the people. I told them that 
they knew I had not lived this, but Jesus 
meant just what He said. If I had told them 
that Jesus did not mean what He said, they 
would have called me a fool. I told them that 
God had set before us a very high standard, 
but it would probably take me a life-time to 
live up to it, but I meant to live what I preached 
to them. The natives there have common 
sense, and they would easily see any discrep- 
ancy between a man's life and preaching. 
After the address was over, the natives began to 
ask me for things ; one asked me for this, and 
another for that, and I gave to them. I began 
to think whereunto this would grow, but I told 
the Lord that I could not see that He meant 
anything different from what He said. I would 
test this text, and though I could not under- 
stand all, I would wait until I could. This 
went on for a day or two. 

" . : . This created quite a stir among the 
people. They had never heard such preaching 
nor seen such living, and they would now listen 
eagerly to the Word of God. One day a group 
of people was waiting outside after the service, 
and from the window in my house I could see 
them, but they could not see me, and one said 
* I got this from the white man yesterday/ and 
another said, ' I am going to ask the white man 



in practice 87 

for things like that/ but another said, ' No, if 
you want it, buy it,' another, ' Yes, buy it, if 
you want it/ After that I lived there three 
years amongst these people and they rarely 
asked me for a thing. A missionary came up 
during the revival, and said that he was de- 
lighted to see the people turning from dumb 
idols to God, and he asked me how it began. I 
told him my experience and about my difficulty 
with that text, and he asked if I supposed that 
it really meant what it said. Then he said, 
* But these people know you ; you have lived 
here for seven years, but if you were to go to 
Palabala they would ask for your house and turn 
you out/ I had been to Palabala and they 
always did beg, but my wife and I went there 
afterwards and remained a week and no one 
asked me for a single thing. 

" We were asked how we would live up to 
this when we got back to England, as there 
was so much distress there. We lived there for 
more than a year but found no difficulty in 
carrying out that text." 

The result of Mr. Richards' new method of 
presenting the Gospel was that he soon had a 
thousand converts where before he had not had 
one, and he testifies that they are really Chris- 
tian people in heart as well as name. " I 
protest against their coming to England or 
America, as they would see a corrupt form of 
Christianity/' he declares. He sums up the 



88 Ube UolstOE 

lesson of his experiences in one sentence : " I 
do believe that if we seek the Kingdom of 
God and His righteousness, all the necessary 
things will be supplied^ because it is His 
promise." 



CHAPTER VII 

THE TOLSTOY OF TO-DAY 

That the examples of the success of Christ's 
teachings should be so few is due to the fact 
that they have been so rarely tested. Count 
Tolstoy is making the experiment to-day, and 
no one who has visited him at his home, as I 
have had the privilege of doing, and has looked 
into his searching eyes under their heavy brows, 
can for a moment doubt his sincerity. He has 
stripped his house of everything superfluous, 
there is not a rug on the floor, not an ornament 
on the table ; his dress is the peasant's blouse ; 
he has become a vegetarian and touches neither 
coffee nor tea nor sugar nor tobacco. That 
there is a vein of asceticism in all this, I am not 
disposed to deny. A German admirer of his 
has called him the John the Baptist of the new 
religion of the Spirit, and if sometimes we are 

Lot C. 



of zro^aj? 8 9 

inclined to criticize him for denying himself 
unnecessarily and for making the externals of 
life a little too bare, we should remember that 
there was room in the world for John whose 
food was locusts and wild honey, and for Jesus 
who came eating and drinking, and that wis- 
dom is justified of all her children. There is a 
place in our economy for the Tolstoys as well 
as for the Ruskins and Morrises. And if there 
seems to be little art in the exterior appearances 
of Tolstoy's life, it is not because he is not an 
artist and has not faced the question of art and 
answered it to his own satisfaction. But he 
denies to the art of the day, the luxurious play- 
thing of the exploiting few, all claim to be con- 
sidered as art at all. 

True art, he believes, is a human activity by 
means of which the artist passes on to others 
feelings through which he has lived, so that 
they become infected by them. It is thus a 
means of uniting men through their feelings. 
The deepest feeling of the present time is that 
of brotherhood, of love, and harmony, and 
true art must have as its object the radiating 
of this feeling. Tried by this standard almost 
all the art of the day is found lacking, and 
Tolstoy is willing to wait until a new and true 
way of life has produced a new and true art. 
That he may not be separated from his fellows, 
he works as he may in the fields and he also 
learned a trade. His aim is to support him- 



90 XTbe TToIstos 

self by manual labour and at any rate to be 
worth his own " keep." He also is continually 
engaged in writing articles and books addressed 
to the peasants or to the educated classes. 
The most conspicuous of these in recent years 
was his great novel Resurrection, a telling in- 
dictment of caste and government which has 
challenged the attention of the world. As 
for the duty of the individual, Tolstoy teaches 
that it is to do the next loving thing. We should 
do to others as we would have them do to us. 
" Only when I yield myself," says he, " to 
that intuition of love which demands obedience 
to this law is my own heart happy and at rest. 
And not only can I know how to act, but I can 
and do discern the work to co-operate in which 
my activity was designed and is required.' ' 
" This work is the annihilaton of discord and 
strife among people and among all creatures 
and the establishment of the highest unity, 
concord and love. Man should always co- 
operate in the development of love and union 
among created things. " It is to man's culti- 
vated instinct, to his conscience illuminated by 
unselfishness, and not to his powers of reasoning 
that Tolstoy looks for the triumph of his ideas. 
Thus he says : 

11 To many people of our society it would be 
impossible to torture or kill a baby, even 
if they were told that by so doing they could 
save hundreds of other people. And in the 






of Uofcas 9 1 

same way a man, when he has developed a 
Christian sensiblilty of heart, finds a whole 
series of actions become impossible for him. 
For instance, a Christian who is obliged to take 
part in judicial proceedings in which a man 
may be sentenced to death, or who is obliged 
to take part in evictions, or in debating a pro- 
posal leading to war, or to participate in pre- 
parations for war, not to mention war itself, is 
in a position parallel to that of a kindly man 
called on to torture or kill a baby." 

And as man's instincts improve and reform 
his conduct, so the instinct of society, which is 
public opinion, will reform society. War and 
violence will cease because they will become 
progressively repugnant to the hearts of men. 

It would be a mistake to consider Tolstoy's 
views as the product of an isolated mind. He 
is in many respects the representation of all 
that is best in his dearly loved Russian peas- 
antry. Le Roy Beaulieu tells us in his work 
on the Empire of the Tzars and the Russians 
(vol. hi., chap. 3), that the Russian common 
people are remarkable for their " charity and 
humility, and what is rarer still and almost un- 
known in the same class in other countries, 
for their spirit of asceticism and renouncement, 
love of poverty, and the taste for self-mortifica- 
tion and sacrifice." He also shows us that the 
moral ideal of the people is complete chastity. 
It is then as the mouth-piece of the Russian 



92 Ube Uolstos 

peasantry, among whom he has learned the 
lesson of his life, that Tolstoy finds his chief 
significance, and they are fortunate in having 
a jnan of such genius and character to represent 
them. 

And here we leave this great teacher — great 
especially in his candour and simplicity. A 
strange figure — this peasant nobleman, this 
aristocrat, born into the ruling class of an 
autocrac}^ who condemns all government and 
caste, this veteran of two wars who proscribes 
all bloodshed, this keen sportsman turned 
vegetarian, this landlord who follows Henry 
George, this man of wealth who will have 
nothing to do with money, this famous novelist 
who thinks that he wasted his time in writing 
most of his novels, this rigid moralist, one of 
whose books at least, the Kreutzer Sonat?, 
was placed under the ban of the American 
Post Office. That same dramatic instinct 
which made him a great novelist, which im- 
pelled Sir Henry Irving to rank his two plays 
among the best of the past century, and which, 
as we have seen, has so often led him to find 
lessons in the active world around him, this 
same instinct has made of this least theatrical 
and most self-forgetful of men the dramatic 
prefigurement in his own person of a reunited 
race, set free by love from the shackles of caste 
and violence. As it was with the prophets of 
old, so with him ? there is a deeper significance 



of XTo*fca£ 93 

in his life, in the tragedy of himself, than in the 
burden of his spoken message. He is the pro- 
tagonist to-day of the drama of the human 
soul. A stage which can put forward such a 
protagonist has no reason for despair; 



APR 28 19C5 



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